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The purpose of this research was to empirically examine the career transitions of mid-career African American women leaving traditional careers for entrepreneurship. The authors illustrate how transition theory and effectuation principles ameliorate an African American woman's transition to entrepreneurship.

The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with nine African American woman entrepreneurs. The data collected were evaluated through the lens of transition theory and effectuation theory.

The study results show that despite being the chief officer, many African American women still face inequalities when negotiating business deals, interacting with partners and when seeking capital for their business. Effectuation theory partially supports an African American woman's career transition to entrepreneurship, but the theory does not fully address the unique experiences of this demographic.

The results of this study reveal that effectuation principles do not fully explain the entrepreneurial career transition experiences of African American women. Theory development and extensions of existing theories should consider the potential discriminatory practices that limit financial resources and strategic partnerships for African American women entrepreneurs. The authors also advocate for consideration of identities, particularly related to gender and race, as factors that contribute to entrepreneurial experiences.

The study findings support the notion that each woman's situation will be different and unique, requiring aspiring African American woman entrepreneurs to assess their individual situation. Consistent access to minority-specific programs can help aspiring African American women entrepreneurs visualize her new identity and provide the support needed to enhance her career transition. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, so each woman will need to craft her own individualized plan.

Findings from this study solidify the role of African American women entrepreneurs as business leaders with influence and direct impact on the US economy. Their success enables African American women to contribute to more inclusive societies through their service to diverse members of society. In addition, their attainment of success serves as a testimony to aspiring African American women that entrepreneurial success is achievable, encouraging more diversity in entrepreneurship.

Few entrepreneurial studies exist on both women and racial minorities, resulting in a paucity of strategies to support African American women throughout their entrepreneurial journey. The results of this study revealed barriers which require specific strategies to address discriminatory lending practices and acceptance when forging new business relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on large-scale portfolio entrepreneurship and its impact on the creation of stable wage employment in African economies.

The three studies focussed on Egypt, Uganda, and Malawi were all exploratory, inductive, and qualitative studies, which involved semi-structured interviews with 65 entrepreneurial founders of some of these countries’ most prominent business portfolios between 2009 and 2012. The data were collected through face-to-face interviews, which lasted between one and four hours, with the founders of each of these portfolios.

This inductive and qualitative study finds a connection between the creation of stable wage-paying jobs and portfolio entrepreneurship in three countries, representing three of the four different archetypal African economies. It also finds a strong connection between the development of new industries and portfolio entrepreneurship.

The practical and societal implications of these findings are incredibly important. The current and looming shortage of stable wage employment in Africa is reaching calamitous proportions. The growth in religion-affiliated terrorism and high-risk economic migration to Europe can be directly related to the lack of employment opportunities in African nations. The findings indicate that portfolio entrepreneurs are major players in the creation of such employment opportunities and government policies focussing on this area, as compared to focussing solely on SMEs, may be more effective in mitigating some of the drivers for emigration and terrorism.

This is the only study of its kind that investigates the role of large-scale portfolio entrepreneurship in the growth of employment opportunities in Africa.

The aim of the research is to examine in depth the relationship between financial support, entrepreneurship and economic growth in emerging African economies.

The study adopts the system-generalized methods of moments (sys-GMM) technique for data analysis and hypothesis testing on a sample of 34 African emerging economies (340 observations) from 2010 to 2019.

The results show that there is significant positive correlation between financial support, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Moreover, entrepreneurship served as a partial mediator between financial support and economic growth in African emerging economies.

This research suggests that African governments should focus on entrepreneurial systems, which are essentially networks driven by the pursuit of individual opportunities and the promotion of new business creation; and introduce other forms of financial assistance, such as loans, loan guarantees, interest subsidies, technical assistance, insurance, etc.

The main novelty of the paper is that the authors empirically investigate the mediating role of entrepreneurship in the association between financial support and economic growth in 34 African emerging economies.

This Guest Editorial provides contextual insight to the contributions in this special issue that addresses entrepreneurship and economic growth challenge confronting Africa. Although the contributors come from various academic disciplines and adopt different perspectives, they are united in their singularity of focus on entrepreneurship as a pathway for African future. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The papers in this special issue adopt different methodological approaches that help to provide a composite insight to the multidimensional entrepreneurial challenges facing Africa. They review published materials from the government sources and international agencies. They draw heavily on the literature in the field of entrepreneurship.

African countries have made significant progress in stimulating economic growth in recent years. However, they still have a long way to go in terms of institutionalizing entrepreneurial paradigm to foster self-regenerating development. Africa needs to do more by leveraging public policy for entrepreneurial development as a pathway for expanding economic opportunities and alleviating poverty. A policy framework designed to anchor entrepreneurial culture in the economy is a key to African economic renaissance in the twenty-first century.

The originality and value of the papers in this issue hinge critically on the all too often ignored proposition that African countries need to embrace a proven approach to development that is both broad based and citizen driven. Entrepreneurial paradigm will empower citizens to take not only full responsibility, but more importantly inalienable ownership, of the development process. This is the only way to ensure that the ongoing much celebrated growth in Africa is sustainable.

By drawing upon institutional theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of four critical resources (credit, electricity, contract enforcement and political governance) in explaining the quality of entrepreneurship and the depth of the supporting entrepreneurship ecosystem in Africa.

A quantitative approach based on ordinary least squares regression analysis was used. Three data sources were employed. First, the Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEI) of 35 African countries was used to measure the quality of entrepreneurship and the depth of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Africa which represents the dependent variable. Second, the World Bank’s data on access to credit, electricity and contract enforcement in Africa were also employed as explanatory variables. Third, the Ibrahim Index of African Governance was used as an explanatory variable. Finally, country-specific data on four control variables (GDP, foreign direct investment, population and education) were gathered and analysed.

To support entrepreneurship development, Africa needs broad financial inclusion and state institutions that are more effective at enforcing contracts. Access to credit was non-significant and therefore did not contribute to the dependent variable (entrepreneurship quality and depth of entrepreneurial support in Africa). Access to electricity and political governance were statistically significant and correlated positively with the dependent variables. Finally, contract enforcement was partially significant and contributed to the dependent variable.

A lack of GEI data for all 54 African countries limited this study to only 35 African countries: 31 in sub-Saharan Africa and 4 in North Africa. Therefore, the generalisability of this study’s findings to the whole of Africa might be limited. Second, this study depended on indexes for this study. Therefore, any inconsistencies in the index aggregation if any could not be authenticated. This study has practical implications for the development of entrepreneurship in Africa. Public and private institutions for credit delivery, contract enforcement and the provision of utility services such as electricity are crucial for entrepreneurship development.

The institutional void is a challenge for Africa. This study highlights the weak, corrupt nature of African institutions that supposedly support MSME growth. Effective entrepreneurship development in Africa depends on the presence of a supportive institutional infrastructure. This study engages institutional theory to explain the role of institutional factors such as state institutions, financial institutions, utility providers and markets in entrepreneurship development in Africa.

This paper aims to explore how the complex interrelationship between historical factors and socio‐economic contexts contributed in shaping the contemporary representation of African entrepreneurship in Britain. Using this prism, it highlights some of the critical developmental challenges and future prospects.

In order to track the connection between historical/immigration experiences and conditions of entrepreneurial development among Africans in Britain, the paper follows in the tradition of socio‐historical method. It leans on syntheses drawn from a broader underpinning literature.

The way in which the historiography of African entrepreneurship is generally presented reveals hybrid and ambivalent positions; guiding as well as constraining the representation of entrepreneurial choices of contemporaneous British Africans. Historical antecedents have strong explanatory powers in the construction or reconstruction of entrepreneurial identities of British Africans.

Against the backcloth of the problems generally encountered in attempts to stimulate and support entrepreneurship in black and African communities in Britain, policy designers very often ignore the fact the solutions will have to be sought from within the paradigms that created the problems. The positioning of this paper is intended to begin to plug this gap.

The concept of discourse is critical to understanding entrepreneurial processes of British Africans and bears careful explanation to their entrepreneurial transitions. This angle of inquiry is novel, with possibilities for opening new sites of knowledge.

Context matters in social entrepreneurship, and it matters a lot. Social entrepreneurs are deeply entrenched in the context where they operate: they respond to its challenges, are shaped by it, and attempt to shape it in turn. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how social entrepreneurship in Africa is still understood within the scope of Western theories, without much consideration for local variations of the commonly shared archetype of social entrepreneurship or for how African norms, values and beliefs may shape our common understanding of this phenomenon.

The authors survey the often-neglected literature on social entrepreneurship in Africa and bring it together in this paper to discuss – also from the vantage point of their own experience and research in diverse African countries – how important assumptions in the social entrepreneurship literature are confirmed, enriched or challenged by key dimensions of African contexts.

Four important themes in the literature on social entrepreneurship in Africa emerged – institutions, embedding values, entrepreneurial behaviour and bricolage and scaling impact – each with its own considerations of how African contexts may challenge predominant assumptions in the extant social entrepreneurship literature, as well as implications for future research.

The authors uncover ways in which the peculiarities of the African context may challenge the underlying – and mostly implicit – assumptions that have shaped the definition and analysis of social entrepreneurship. They end by offering their understanding of social entrepreneurship and its concomitant dimensions in Africa as a stepping stone for advancing the field in the continent and beyond.

One of the main obstacles to the flourishment of African entrepreneurship is financial constraint. Existing studies on the nexus between entrepreneurship and financial development are inconclusive, while the position of African economies remains unknown. The purpose of this paper is to empirically study the impact of financial development on entrepreneurship in Africa.

This study utilizes data of 20 selected countries in Africa over a period of 2006–2017. International Monetary Fund (IMF) data on broad-based financial development were combined with World Bank Entrepreneurship database. This study uses system generalized methods of moments (system GMM) technique and the recently developed dynamic panel threshold based on dynamic panel GMM.

The following findings emerged: financial development does not spur entrepreneurship in Africa; there is a threshold at which financial development improves the level of African entrepreneurship; and the tendency of financial development to improve the level of entrepreneurship is conditioned on conducive business regulation and strong institutional quality at a specific threshold value.

This is one of the few studies that examines the impact of financial development on entrepreneurship in Africa. This study shows that the financial development relies on the effectiveness of regulatory environment to extend loan and other financial services to new firm entrants. In addition, the results of this study reveal that the assumption of linearity in the nexus between finance and entrepreneurship is not tenable for the case of Africa. Therefore, policymakers should keep on developing African financial system to accelerate the pace of entrepreneurship development.

Economic complexity reflects the nature of knowledge accumulated and technological capability of a nation. This study aims to evaluate the impact of economic complexity on entrepreneurship in selected African countries.

The study uses country’s level data of 18 countries covering a period of 2006–2017. Data are sourced from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Observatory of Economic Complexity database, World Bank’s Entrepreneurship Database and World Development indicators. To estimate models, the study uses panel-spatial correlation consistent, which is based on Driscoll and Kraay’s (1998) standard error, Method of Moments Panel Quantile regression proposed by Machado and Silva (2019) and instrumental variables estimation techniques.

The study’s findings are as follows. First, economic complexity improves entrepreneurship in Africa. Second, there is no evidence of nonlinear relationship between economic complexity and entrepreneurship for the case of African nations. The positive impact of economic complexity on entrepreneurship is persistent across all quantiles in the analysis. The empirical analysis suggests that the beneficial impact of African entrepreneurship is further strengthened by ethnic and religious diversity but reduced by weak political institutions.

This study stresses the role of economic complexity in the entrepreneurial activities. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to empirically provide insights on the important role of economic complexity on entrepreneurship in Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the President Obama Youth African Leadership Initiative (YALI) program with evidence from experts and other relevant stakeholders. This study examines YALI program with a focus on entrepreneurship and public management.

Qualitative semi-structured interviews used in this study explore the understanding and diverse views of various stakeholder experts on training of young leaders in entrepreneurship and public management in Africa regarding the YALI program.

The study provides insight into the importance of the YALI program, but questions whether it can make a positive impact and be effectively implemented in Africa. The findings suggest that there is lack of clarity in the objectives of the program, particularly with regards to the role of the key stakeholders including academics, government institutions, policymakers and the private sector. The results underscore the need for sound and clear-cut government policies toward entrepreneurship development that will foster a better relationship between the African governments and the United States Agency for International Development program.

The study focused on academic experts and a number of policymakers and may not have been representative of all stakeholders.

The study specifically emphasizes policies that target entrepreneurship training and education for women and youth, using a participatory approach and multi-stakeholder partnership to promote innovative entrepreneurship and social development in the continent.