The purpose of this study was to assess the perceived qualities and challenges of entrepreneurs as well as the socio-economic roles of entrepreneurship in Bahir Dar city. It answers questions like what extents of business persons have entrepreneurial qualities/traits in the study area? How entrepreneurial qualities could be learnt and developed? What are the challenges that are facing entrepreneurs? What are the social roles of entrepreneurship in the study area? What are the roles of entrepreneurship for economic development on the study area? The researcher has employed a mixed method research approacha sequential explanatory design. The study has collected relevant information from a survey of 65 business persons and 5 interviewees from the Scale up! Clients of DOT Bahir Dar in its first implementation phase of Entrepreneurship and Business Growth in Ethiopia (EBGE) project. The sampling technique used to select the respondents for the questionnaire was availability sampling while purposive sampling employed for selecting the interviewees. Then, the quantitative data was collected through face to face questionnairing strategy as it allows researcher to explain and probe out questions. The analysis was conducted using SPSS version 23 software. As a tool descriptive data analysis, frequency tables and figure have been used. Then, the qualitative data was collected through interview and analyzed using descriptive analysis and qualitative narrations. The finding of the study showed that 60% of the business owners were entrepreneurs. The quantitative findings has shown input related challenge, skill related challenge, facility related challenge, premise related challenge and market related challenges were the most serious challenges of business persons generally and entrepreneurs particularly in the study area sharing 92.3%, 90.8%, 81.5%, 78.5% and 73.8% responses respectively. And, market related challenges, human recourse related challenges, government related challenges and financial related challenges share 73.8%, 64.6%, 56.9%, and 43.1% responses respectively. These problems were also narrated qualitatively by the entrepreneur/interviewees. The findings also revealed that entrepreneurship has different socio-economic roles for the entrepreneus themselves and for the community generally. Finally, based on the findings, recommendations and future study areas were forwarded to overcome the researched problems.