Abstract:
Financial management is one of the most important responsibilities of owners and business managers
and whatever you do or do not include in the budget section of your application could be the
difference between success and failure. The purpose of this article was to investigate through
principals and bursars on the financial management constraints faced by principals of public
secondary schools of Mezam Division of the North West Region of Cameroon. Three research
questions and three hypotheses were postulated to guide the study. The sample size was purposively
made up of 78 principals and 49 bursars giving a total of 127 respondents. Data were collected using
a questionnaire and analysed using means and t-test analysis. Major findings were that the
respondents agreed to a very high extent on administrative bottlenecks as a constraint with a cluster
mean of 3.53 and 3.48 for principals and bursars respectively. With a cluster mean of 3.88 and 3.72,
principals and bursars agreed to a very high extent on constraints as a result of spending out of
school rubrics and, with a mean score of 3.35 and 3.36 they agreed that insufficient provision of
funds constituted a constraint to financial management. On the whole the study equally portrayed
that although the three variables are almost having the same strength of constraint on principals with
administrative bottlenecks and insufficient provision of funds scoring 33% each, spending out of
school rubrics shows more of the constraint with a score of 34%. The study recommended that
government should provide sufficient funds to run schools, such funds should be made available on
time, principals and bursars should have knowledge of financial management skills and the funds
should be used mainly for those things budgeted for.
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