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Paper abstract:

Objective: This paper is an attempt to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in Herat, Afghanistan. Methods: This research is descriptive and data is first-hand data gathered from a survey. In addition, a Likert-type questionnaire of 23 questions distributed to the sample. According to the Ministry of Commerce & Industry of Afghanistan. the number of SMEs is not determined in Herat Province and there is no exact figure. therefore, the indefinite sample size method used for SMEs and 385 was the sample size for this research. The questionnaire distributed as per the simple random method. According to the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy test, this sample size has 89.8 percent adequacy. Findings: From the figures, it can be analyzed that COVID-19 had a negative impact on SMEs in Herat Province, Afghanistan. It highly decreased financial ability, market, and employees' situation, and highly increased the cost of SMEs. Data shows that, at a 95 percent confidence interval, there is no evidence to accept the null hypotheses for all five hypotheses because the significant values are less than 0.05, and it can be analyzed that COVID-19 had an impact on each factor of the study for this reason all research hypotheses have been accepted. On the other hand, as per the Nagelkerke R square test, it can be analyzed that, COVID-19 had a 38.2 percent impact on the SMEs in Herat Province. Generally, it can be concluded that COVID-19 had an impact on SMEs in Herat Province. Novelty: this paper is done in the Herat province of Afghanistan for the first time, it has been done in 2022- 2023, first-hand datagathered, the reliability of the questionnaire checked twice, it has a structural model, the data are analyzed as per the non-parametric test theories

Keywords: Covid-19, Small and Medium Enterprise, Finance, Market, Cost, Employee,