Research studies have shown that availability of money, financial knowledge, and awareness of good business practices create a multiplier effect that further helps individuals and families lift themselves out of poverty. However, people have believed that without money they cannot operate a business and therefore they end up poor. The purpose of this research work is to identify the non-financial services offered by various MFIs and to examine the impact of these services project success of the beneficiaries. The specific objectives were to study the adequacy of non-financial support services to projects in Rwanda, identify the categories of beneficiaries of non-financial support services to projects in Rwanda, to study the effect of non-financial support services on project success in Rwanda and to find out the relationship between non-financial support services and project success in Rwanda. The researcher targeted 275 BDF clients in 3 districts of Kigali City. The researcher has also selected 5 senior employees of BDF who are directly responsible for project development. However, out of 275 clients 73 of them were selected to form a sample size. The researcher used a random sampling method to collect the data from the beneficiaries. Purposive sampling was used to collect information from the staff because they were few. The researcher used questionnaires to collect the data from the beneficiaries and interview to collect information from the staff. The data was been analyzed using descriptive statistics whereby Pearson correlations were used to establish the relationship between variables. The study found that BDF is involved in pre and post financing stages such as the facilitation of the process of business development, from conceptualization, business planning, access to finance, and post financing support in terms of strengthening managerial capacity of SMEs, accountability, to mention but a few of the challenges that most small enterprises face. It was also established that the relationship between non-financial services and project success lies on the ability of entrepreneur to mitigate, to meet client satisfaction and management of sustainable growth of the business. On the other hand majority of the respondents also believe that this relationship goes to a greater extent in terms when it comes to the profitability, realistic planning and competitiveness of an entrepreneur. The study recommends that although such non-financial services are practical and successfully affects the SMEs performance, there is little information about such services in the market. Many people still do not know about the existence of these services and therefore BDF need to improve their sensitization strategies in order to reach to more audience.
Keywords: Non-Financial Support Service, Project Success
