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The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of how the institutions of family and culture play out in shaping family business practices. This study focusses on family business led by poor entrepreneurial women in a context of extreme poverty.

The methods included participant observation, focus groups and interviews in two poor villages in South-East Nigeria. Thematic analysis was used to develop insight about how the institutions of family and culture shape family business practices.

The analysis demonstrated that the family, with associated responsibilities and norms, is a powerful institution that determines women’s role and business behaviours. Poor entrepreneurial women depend on the family to run their business, but also use the business to sustain the family. They make use of their limited resources (e.g. time, money, skills) to meet families’ basic needs and pay for necessities such as children’s education. These are family priorities, rather than maximising profits.

The study was limited to rural Africa, in particular to a small sample of rural women entrepreneurs in South-East Nigeria, and as such, the findings are not necessarily generalisable, but may be at a conceptual level.

The study has highlighted the need to tailor micro-enterprise development programmes that facilitate change, add values to entrepreneurial activities and support women to fulfil their roles and ease institutional pressures affecting rural women economic activities. In short, such programmes need to account for cultural institutions.

This study presents insights of the influence of institutions (family and culture) in business led by rural Nigerian women.

This research fills a gap in the family business literature by offering conceptual insights about how the institutional obligations of family mean that micro-enterprising should be conceptualised as an entity, rather than as a family in business or the family business.

The purpose of this paper is to address the problem of why the poorest, most disadvantaged groups such as rural African women, benefit less from microfinance. The authors focus on the perception and experiences of ordinary rural entrepreneurial women on microfinance in a context of extreme poverty and where family responsibility and economic activities are closely intertwined.

The authors purposefully sampled 15 poor females with small businesses in two Nigerian villages. The key characteristic guiding the sampling was that the respondents had to be poor. The authors held two focus groups and ten interviews to capture their experience and understanding of microfinance. The authors used thematic analysis to establish patterns in the data.

For poor entrepreneurial women, a livelihood for survival, putting food on the table and paying school fees are priorities, not business growth. They see microcredit as debt and a great risk that could lead to irreversible losses. Family responsibilities for basic consumption needs of the household can affect their ability to repay loans; perceived dangers of microcredit may outweigh potential benefits.

The theories, especially functionalist economic theory, do not take account of microfinance users’ experiences.

Microfinance should be aware that the poorest perceive microcredit differently and should eliminate the intimidating barriers raised to them. Instead of providing a means for the poor to alleviate poverty or coping strategies for them to manage cash flows and risks, microfinance causes fear and anxiety by demanding high rate of return in a very short period of time.

The very poorest, who should be the beneficiaries of microfinance, are less likely to be able to benefit. The condition of poverty creates different realities for those at the base of the pyramid.

This research questions the neoliberal rationality assumptions that microfinance rest on; the paper fills a gap in the literature, i.e. how the potential borrowers themselves living in deep-rooted poverty perceive and experience microfinance.

Women entrepreneurs face several challenges in creating and running ventures, especially in emerging and developing countries. In this sense, by aiming to generate inputs capable of helping overcome them, this study aims to categorize the policy, managerial and practical implications of articles whose empirical research was in one or more of the 155 emerging and developing countries. Further, although scholars have addressed female entrepreneurship in developed economies, there is scant literature in the context explored here. This article provides suggestions for new studies, helping academics fill gaps in the literature.

This article adopts a systematic literature review approach, performing content analysis and bibliometric description for the sample. The study comprises 77 articles selected from the Scopus and Web of Science databases.

Research concentrates on Asian countries, with lower incidences in Latin America and Africa. The policy implications focus mainly on the executive rather than legislative spheres. The practical implications focus mainly on entrepreneurial development agencies and women entrepreneurs. Among the suggestions for novel studies, those focusing on methodological choices and female enterprises stand out.

This paper maps and categorizes the policy, managerial and practical implications, helping to raise governments’, policymakers’ and practitioners’ awareness of the preferred strategies to overcome the challenges of female entrepreneurship.

This paper emphasizes reflections of mutual interest to researchers, policymakers and practitioners, filling gaps in studies that prioritize an academic audience. Regarding the academic audience, this paper contributes to innovatively categorizing suggestions for future research and building an extensive research agenda capable of guiding research in this area.

This paper seeks to systematically review and synthesise existing research knowledge on African women entrepreneurship to identify gaps for future studies.

The paper conducted a systematic literature review of published studies from 1990 to 2020 on women entrepreneurship in Africa using a 5M gender aware framework of Brush et al. (2009).

The systematic literature review of published studies found the fragmentation, descriptive and prescriptive orientation of studies on Africa women entrepreneurship and devoid of theoretical focus. Further, women entrepreneurship studies tended to be underpinned from various disciplines, less from the entrepreneurship lens, mostly quantitative, and at its infancy stage of development. With a primary focus on development, enterprise performance and livelihood, studies rarely attended to issues of motherhood and the nuanced understanding of women entrepreneurship’s embeddedness in family and institutional contexts of Africa.

The paper questions the view that women entrepreneurship is a “panacea” and unravels how family context, customary practices, poverty and, rural-urban and formal/informal divide, significantly shape and interact with African women entrepreneurs’ enterprising experience and firm performance.

The findings and analyses indicate that any initiatives to support women empowerment via entrepreneurship should consider the socially constructed nature of women entrepreneurship and the subtle interplay of the African institutional contexts’ intricacies, spatial and locational differences which significantly influence women entrepreneurs’ choices, motivations and goals for enterprising.

The paper contributes to a holistic understanding of women entrepreneurship in Africa by using a 5M framework to review the research knowledge. In addition, the paper not only identifies unexplored/or less examined issues but also questions the taken-for-granted assumptions of existing knowledge and suggest adoption of context- and gender-sensitive theories and methods.

As families engage in entrepreneurship, particularly in developing economies, women's engagement in such activities is subject to the traditional cultures, norms and values of the communities to which they belong. This paper aims to investigate how the socio-cultural context influences women's entrepreneurship as women engage in “family entrepreneuring”.

The study draws on an inductive qualitative approach to explore how multiple cultural, social and economic contexts encourage women's entrepreneurship and, thus, position them at the centre of family entrepreneuring within this community. Using snowballing techniques, we analyse narratives from 51 women entrepreneurs, generated through semi-structured interviews, to reveal key insights into the practice of family entrepreneuring.

The findings reveal the complex socio-cultural context within the “Adja” community, where polygamy, a traditional and cultural practice, enables the transfer of culturally and socially embedded informal knowledge. The study explains how women's entrepreneuring activities are supported by informal in-family apprenticeships, resulting in family members learning specific skills while also experiencing the feeling of belonging to the family. Showcasing the heterogeneity of contexts, particularly those found in Africa, this study challenges the normative view within the Global North and the dominance of the “heroic male” in entrepreneurship by showcasing how women (especially matriarchs) are significant actors in training other women, co-wives, daughters and relatives in family entrepreneuring.

Thus, this study contributes to the extant literature on family entrepreneuring by revealing an unusual case of women from polygamous families becoming the focal actors in family entrepreneuring activity and challenging the culturally ascribed gender roles to evolve into the breadwinners in their households, as well as focusing on how this process is driven by endogenous knowledge exchange.