Female Entrepreneurship in East Africa

This doctoral research project aims to establish both historical and contemporary reasons for the greater prevalence of female entrepreneurship in West Africa. It is important to understand this because a) entrepreneurship is an important driver of economic growth and job creation, and b) gender has been recognized as an important factor in driving social development, inclusive growth and intergenerational progress. However, entrepreneurship data essentially includes self-employment or necessity-driven entrepreneurship in the so-called 'informal sector', and can also be an important indicator of inequality and uneven access to opportunities in education and the 'formal' sectors of the economy. Hence it is important to avoid simplistic celebratory narratives and to identify instead the complex and varied reasons behind the predominance of women in West African entrepreneurship.
- Why do women in West Africa chose to become entrepreneurs more commonly than in other areas of the world?
- What drives these choices: necessity, cultural attitudes, lack of alternative opportunities, historical tradition, gender stereotypes?
Where the data allows, we aim to map educational access and attainment on to occupational choice as well as engaging with the substantial literature on the informal sector in Africa. The project will also generate new data, which would enable us to revisit historical interpretations of women's entrepreneurship and present-day categorisations of entrepreneurial activity. Such insight would contribute to research debates in entrepreneurship and African history.
Methodologically, the project can draw on a range of pre-existing data in addition to conducting new primary research. One source of long-run historical data is being collected by the Economic History of Christian Africa project (https://ehca.info/) which collects information from Anglican marriage registers of the Christian Missionary Service on the occupation of both spouses. This data offers unprecedented insight into the occupational choices of both men and women across Africa for the late 19th and large parts of the 20th century. In addition to this, the student will conduct qualitative research interviews in West Africa with female entrepreneurs to gain a sense of their motivations for going into business. These in-depth interviews will seek to establish the life trajectories of female entrepreneurs to understand the circumstances in which they first went into entrepreneurial activities and why they subsequently remained in them and how their activities evolved. Through this in-depth investigation the project will be able to contribute theoretical insight that is grounded in the data and that will complement larger scale surveys such as GEM or EHCA. The combination of secondary and primary data would allow the student to understand contemporary primary data in the broader context of historical trends and peculiarities. Importantly, it would allow a better-grounded analysis of the impact that the political and economic trajectory of African states in the twentieth century had on individual occupational choices, or whether historical roots and cultural factors are more important determinants. The student is expected to undertake overseas fieldwork in the region of West Africa.