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Challenging Established Structures: Gender and Rural Entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa

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Understanding Entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa

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Abstract

Despite an increasing scholarly attention to understand rural entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurial processes in developing countries’ context are largely unexplored. Knowledge about different structures that configures rural entrepreneurial processes is inadequate to fully understand the phenomena from the perspectives of developing countries. More specifically, the knowledge of rurality and the gendered structures, and their influences on rural entrepreneurship, remains mostly assumptive amongst professionals and policymakers. This chapter attempts to fill this knowledge gap by exploring, analysing and discussing the influence of rurality and gendered structures on rural entrepreneurship. We achieve our objectives with the aid of three case studies of rural women entrepreneurs in the agricultural sector within Sub-Saharan African countries’ context, Tanzania in particular.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    VICOBA stands for Village Community Banks. In Tanzania, VICOBA provides a structure through which communities are able to organize themselves, provide skill-sharing and capacity building in an effort to combat poverty. Each member puts in a small amount of money every month in form of shares and can take out loans when needed. At the end of every calendar year, the amount collected from shares is distributed back to members, each receives according to her/his shares. Most groups also set aside an emergency pool, to provide support for members with a form of insurance/guarantee.

  2. 2.

    For the purpose of this study, all respondents and places have been given randomly assigned fictitious names for anonymity.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Dar es Salaam Business School, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

    Merezia Wilson Bambaganya

  2. Swedish University of Agricultural Science, Uppsala, Sweden

    Johan Gaddefors

Authors
  1. Merezia Wilson Bambaganya
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  2. Johan Gaddefors
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Correspondence to Merezia Wilson Bambaganya .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Muma College of Business, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

    Jean Kabongo

  2. Faculty of Graduate Studies, Athabasca University, Athabasca, AB, Canada

    Simon Sigué

  3. Organization and Human Resource Management, University of Ghana Business School, Accra, Ghana

    James Baba Abugre

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Bambaganya, M.W., Gaddefors, J. (2024). Challenging Established Structures: Gender and Rural Entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa. In: Kabongo, J., Sigué, S., Baba Abugre, J. (eds) Understanding Entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa. Palgrave Studies of Entrepreneurship and Social Challenges in Developing Economies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50128-9_8

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