Challenges and opportunities of e-commerce to entrepreneurship and small business development: a case of Zanzibar arts and craft producers.

Small and Medium enterprises sector experience major change in Tanzania in 2000s due to number of government initiatives in recognized the importance of the sector in the economy and changes its policy by creation of SMEs Policy in 2003 and the introduction of Private sector Competitiveness Program on 2005 this deliberate initiatives enable the formation of Tanzania Business Council and Empower the Tanzania Investment Centre in order to attract local and foreign investors to invest in Tanzania. The development of ICT and the merging of new way of people doing trade create opportunity, as well as challenge for SMEs as well as the regulatory authority as the small business, wanted to adopt the change and gain the benefit of it but some of them feared the unknown and side effect of this adaption the development of online Commerce create both and lead positive but also create dilemma of either restriction or adaption to many SMEs. The small business they can’t reject the adaption of the e-commerce they need to learn and adapted the changes of technologies if they wanted to be on business as the world now changes from cash to cashless so there is a need for SMEs to prepare for this change in the marker, the Arts and Crafts depends on Tourism which most of them come from European Countries where the cashless transaction is dominant so they need to prepare for this the development of E-commerce need certain kind of environment that needed to be in place the SMEs need to be trained on advantages of it the risk and how to mitigate them the government need to prepare the system and security measure in which the online business will take place and control as well as the banks which are the intermediaries so they need to prepare the package that suit the need of our SMEs and act as the bridges to shift from cash-based business to cashless business and avoid the perception of customer and client relation. Key words: Small Business Development, E-Commerce, Arts and Crafts, Women Empowerment, Zanzibar Private sector Development.