While Africa plays home to an imposing start up scene, local entrepreneurs still face numerous challenges, and funding is a key one of them. As West African entrepreneurs encounter many financing barriers, they often use creative funding sources and strategies in order to bypass the traditional sources of loans. The use of untraditional financial sources is known as bootstrap financing, which refers to a method of financing using internal sources to attain required capital rather than external funds. The purpose of this study is to determine the link between the creative financial alternatives used by the Senegalese entrepreneurs. To proceed, we surveyed 103 MSMEs in Dakar. Firstly, we examined the univariate statistics, and secondly, we use tests such as One-way ANOVA and Chi-square. Results highlighted the predominance of self-funded methods, the impact of the level of education and the minimization of the capital invested (such as the use of social networks), when studying bootstrapping techniques employed by Senegalese managers. Results contribute to the lack of research related to the topic, especially when conducted in the West African region, which is strongly characterized by information asymmetry and informality.
