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Rural farm and non-farm based entrepreneurial activities within Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) play significant roles in job creation as well as food security for the majority of rural dwelling citizens (UNCTAD, 2018). This chapter examines the policies and strategies for supporting both farm and non-farm entrepreneurial activities within rural communities in SSA. In order to achieve this, the authors have completed a systematic literature review of both conceptual and empirical work on the role of policies and strategies for rural entrepreneurship in selected SSA, namely Ethiopia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and the United Republic of Tanzania (URT). This was completed alongside an assessment of the constraints and potential opportunities in order to stimulate linkages between rural entrepreneurship and structural economic transformation including the potential roles of both farm and non-farm based entrepreneurial activities. Key linkages between rural farm and non-farm based entrepreneurial activities are emphasised The chapter also highlights mechanisms through which governments and private sectors can work together for the maximisation of available opportunities and best practices that rural entrepreneurship can offer for job creation among rural communities in SSA.

Despite the interest in non-profit and sustainable ways of connecting farms to society, less is known about how to conduct this through digital technology and communication. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to discuss how to connect farms to society through digital technology and communication.

In-depth interviews of 15 Australian farmers were conducted in order to understand their perceptions of how to engage in digital forms of social entrepreneurship and thematic analysis techniques were utilized to understand the content from the interview transcripts.

The findings suggest that digital social farm entrepreneurship can be categorized into social bricoleurs, social constructionists and social engineers.

This typology helps to understand the contextual role farm entrepreneurs play in rural economies and their place in global societies.

Many Australian farms are in remote locations far from urban centers, which makes digital forms of social entrepreneurship an important way that farmers can promote social entrepreneurial ventures.

This paper highlights how there has been a growing interest in developing social entrepreneurship in Australian farms due to their connection with rural communities and environments.

Sustainable entrepreneurship is crucial for the ongoing viability and growth of rural economies. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the role of farm entrepreneurs in the sustainable development of rural regional areas by focusing on the Sunraysia farming community in Australia.

The theoretical framework of evolutionary economics is utilized to understand the process of sustainable entrepreneurship for entrepreneurs in rural areas and a case study design is utilized to build theory linking place attachment, innovation legitimacy, and coopetitive behavior to sustainable farm entrepreneurship. The case studies are analyzed using an inductive approach to make theoretical contributions to rural and sustainable entrepreneurship.

The key findings are that coopetition is necessary amongst sustainable farm entrepreneurs in order to induce a culture of innovation.

This study focuses on the Sunraysia region of Australia so might be limited in scope and replication to other geographic areas.

This study focuses on the role of rural regional areas and the special entrepreneurial characteristics of the Sunraysia region due to immigration and location advantages.

This paper aims to explore how gender is “done” on farms in Sweden in the context of increased tourism and hospitality activities. The authors seek to investigate how gender is done vis-à-vis women’s farm tourism entrepreneurship. They seek to answer the questions: What has motivated the farm women to become tourism entrepreneurs? How are the gendered divisions of labor changed through women starting businesses? How does the gendered associated symbolism, as well as the identities, change?

Research has indicated that introducing tourism entrepreneurship at farms may challenge established gender relations, as many of these entrepreneurs are women. The empirical material consists of in-depth interviews with 15 women farm tourism entrepreneurs in central Sweden.

The analysis suggests that the gendered divisions of labor are not changed through the interviewed women starting tourism businesses. The authors conclude that the women build their entrepreneurship and develop some of their products on an image of rural domesticity, including a representation of themselves as traditional farm women. At the same time they are changing how gender is done through identifying as entrepreneurs and changing the use of the farms.

The authors seek to fill the research gap concerning women’s farm tourism entrepreneurship and the potential associated gendered changes. Their theoretical contribution is applying the perspective of “doing gender” and entrepreneurship, for delineating potential changes in gendered relations.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a sector-based analysis of the drivers for social entrepreneurship in the agricultural sector.

The paper uses qualitative data from two studies in the Danish region of Northern Jutland. The data include responses from 38 farmers who offered or had considered offering social services. The analytical framework is taken from a review of the limited literature on Green Care and Social Farming and social entrepreneurship theory.

Strong and consistent tools for the categorisation of farmers’ social entrepreneurship have been developed. However, these tools have merely been used descriptively rather than to create proactive agriculture policies to facilitate social entrepreneurship. In Region Northern Jutland social entrepreneurship in farming is driven by a combination of tradition, close relationships and coincidence. It is ad hoc, with each initiative starting from scratch because no knowledge or experience has been gathered or distributed.

The agricultural sector-based approach to social entrepreneurship will not be discussed against other approaches to social entrepreneurship. This would be a suggestion for another more conceptual kind of article in the future.

A study of social entrepreneurship among farmers has not yet been coupled with a sector-based analytical framework. This paper contributes to the literature of social entrepreneurship by supplementing with an agricultural sector-based approach.

This study aims to explore the shift in social and cultural values in the wake of ongoing change; specifically, the degree of embeddedness of these values among farm-based entrepreneurs. The authors examine how this value-change-embeddedness continuum can further the development of theories in the field of social entrepreneurship.

The authors use an exploratory and a descriptive approach when interviewing eight farmers and members of their respective households. The sample encompasses almost all the providers of farm-based tourism in this particular area of rural Norway. The empirical materials form the basis for selecting our theoretical approach, one of which is a structural life-mode analysis.

The findings show that the social value of self-reliance, when taken to extremes, can hinder the growth of deeper commercial cooperation between farmers. This constitutes a challenge to efficiency and effectiveness on a larger scale, given a need for both independence and interdependence together with flexible entrepreneurial network cooperation in social entrepreneurship. The findings also indicate that social entrepreneurship does not necessarily have to include a cognitive shift in values and roles for the exclusion of a productive entrepreneurial identity.

By focusing on value changes in social entrepreneurship, this paper addresses a significant gap in the entrepreneurship literature relating to the process of value creation. By using the structural life-mode analysis, this study identifies the underlying value changes that are fundamental to entrepreneurial processes, allowing that process to unfold and take hold to the betterment of affected farm-based communities.

This paper aims to investigate the entrepreneurial behaviours exhibited by commercial smallholder farmers in Zimbabwe, focusing on their socio-economic characteristics, and considers their implication for outcomes of livelihood resilience in a resource-constrained and turbulent rural context.

The study used survey data collected from 430 smallholder farmers in Masvingo province, Zimbabwe. Using a two-step cluster analysis, the study constructed a typology of farmers based on their entrepreneurial behaviour and socio-economic characteristics.

The results revealed that commercial smallholder farmers are heterogeneous in terms of their entrepreneurial behaviours. Four clusters were identified: non-entrepreneurial, goal-driven, means-driven and ambidextrous. Beyond their entrepreneurial behaviours, these clusters significantly differ in the socio-economic characterises (gender, age, education levels, farm size, proximity to the market and social connection) and farm performance (seasonal sales per hectare and farm income per hectare).

The typology framework relating farmers’ entrepreneurial behaviours to their socio-economic characteristics and business performance is important to tailor and therefore improve the effectiveness of farmer entrepreneurship programmes and policies. In particular, tailoring farmer entrepreneurship education is crucial to distribute land, finance and market resources in purposive ways to promote a combination of smallholder farmers’ effectual and causal behaviours at an early stage of their farm ventures.

Researchers still know little about which farmers’ behaviours are entrepreneurial and how these behaviours manifest in action during their commercial farm activities. This research leverages effectuation and causation theory to unveil previously overlooked distinctions on farmers’ entrepreneurial behaviours, thereby enhancing a more grounded understanding of farmer entrepreneurship in a resource-constrained context.

There is a recent growing interest to find a lasting intervention to rural poverty (RP) in developing countries based on farmer entrepreneurship and innovation. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to examine the relation between entrepreneurship and RP alleviation in two resource-constrained provinces of China. This paper assesses the influence of three capabilities of farm entrepreneurs – educational, economic and socio-cultural – on farmer entrepreneurship growth and how these, in turn, impact alleviation of RP.

Household survey data comprising 363 respondents were taken from four deprived communities in two provinces of China. The paper employed structural equation modeling (SEM), using AMOS 21.0 alongside SPSS 20.0 to test the relations between the constructs.

The results show that a statistically significant and positive relation exists between entrepreneurship and RP alleviation in China. The findings of the study further reveal that qualitative growth of entrepreneurship has a stronger positive influence on RP alleviation than on quantitative growth, and socio-cultural capabilities of respondents significantly and positively affect entrepreneurial growth of farmers, rather than education and economic capabilities.

The use of data from four communities in two provinces tends to limit the ability to generalize the findings of the study. Furthermore, the survey did not collect information on non-farm entrepreneurs, making it impossible to compare the findings from farm entrepreneurs with non-farm entrepreneurs.

The findings have practical implications for policy makers in rural China toward addressing targeted RP. This paper, therefore, suggests that entrepreneurship should be pursued vigorously among farmers in rural areas of China to help solve poverty. The paper also presents a useful lesson for various stakeholders in poverty alleviation programs in other developing countries.

This paper contributes to the academic literature on the entrepreneurship–RP alleviation nexus by combining the theory of capability and SEM in the analysis of an emerging economy such as China.

Entrepreneurship is currently at the focus of much theoretical, practical and political interest. In Europe, agriculture has faced dramatic pressures for restructuring, and facilitation of the entrepreneurial skills of farmers and stronger entrepreneurial orientation in the rural areas have been hailed as possible solutions for the emerging problems. The aim of this paper is to use this nexus of agriculture and entrepreneurship as an illustrative example, through which the nature of entrepreneurial skills and the elements underpinning their adoption can be examined.

The task is carried out by reflecting theoretically on the concept of entrepreneurial skills and on their embedded nature, before demonstrating the usefulness of the concept as a tool in understanding the case of an enterprising Finnish farmer, active both in conventional farming and in diversified business.

The theoretical and case study analyses reveal that the concept of entrepreneurial skills is far from an unambiguous one, as well as is the aim to develop them through teaching. If proper care is taken to distinguish the concept from, and relate it to, the elements in which it is embedded, the notion is a useful tool for empirical investigation. By applying such a procedure, it is shown that the contexts of conventional farming and business diversification call for clearly different entrepreneurial skills, some of which are more amenable to teaching than others.

This paper shows how one can develop a fuller understanding of the skills that farmers need to become entrepreneurial by diversification.

This paper aims to explore the market creation practices of farm-based entrepreneurs in the local food sector. Alternative marketing channels for farm-based products increase, but it is not known how entrepreneurs work to position their products in the marketplace. By expanding on the research of farm-based entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial marketing (EM), this study explores the entrepreneurial practices that farm-based entrepreneurs use through the lens of the EM mix (EMM) and its constituent dimensions: person, purpose, practice and process.

The study uses a multiple case study design and follows a phenomenological approach in conducting in-depth retrospective interviews with 11 successful farm-based entrepreneurs in the local food sector in Norway.

The thematic analysis revealed four key EM practices of the study’s farm-based entrepreneurs: transferring the farm or transforming the farm as the primary purpose; legitimising a local brand through the uniqueness of person, purpose and place; using a personal networking approach in the market development process and flexible and controllable market expansion practices. These elements constitute the pillars of successful, creative and resource-efficient market development.

The study represents a pioneering attempt to explore and conceptualise EM within farm-based entrepreneurship. The findings ultimately give rise to a novel framework: the farm-based entrepreneur’s marketing mix (FEMM).