Development of entrepreneurial ecosystem for women entrepreneurs in Sudan

Abstract

Poverty has become a global issue and is one of the crucial challenges of economic advancement and a significant setback for sustainable development efforts. Thus, poverty alleviation has become the overarching objective for development agencies and the top agenda for policymakers. Promoting women‘s entrepreneurship has been seen as an intervention strategy to attain economic development and alleviate poverty. In the context of developing economies, microfinance is considered a powerful instrument for financial inclusion to stimulate entrepreneurship and accelerate the effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. However, it will not be possible without removing the business barriers women entrepreneurs face to fuel economic development. Therefore, the study proposes a collaboration model to support women‘s entrepreneurship development. Along the way, the study explains how the contextual factors in a country shape the institutional environment, especially the Microfinance Institution (MFI) environment, in legitimatizing entrepreneurial activity for women. The Sudanese women entrepreneurs engaged in the microfinance program in Sudan were selected as the study participants. The responses were analyzed employing NVIVO software. The findings revealed that Sudanese women entrepreneurs suffer from formal institutional barriers, namely microfinance, and legal and political barriers. Additionally, informal institutional barriers (i.e., societal norms and cultural values) hinder women entrepreneurs‘ performance and growth in Sudan. Therefore, this study proposed an entrepreneurial ecosystem model based on the existing collaborative Quintuple Helix Model that supports women‘s entrepreneurship development. The proposed model contains five pillars: government, technology, civil society, academic institutions, and microfinance institutions. The entrepreneurial ecosystem model is designed to support women entrepreneurs to thrive and succeed in their businesses, eventually contributing to Sudan‘s economic and social development. The finding of this study will be beneficial to the Sudan government as it highlights the current obstacles to developing women‘s entrepreneurship and addresses the main factors that need to be considered for improving the entrepreneurial ecosystem. More importantly, the study provided empirical evidence to all nations aiming to empower women‘s entrepreneurship by explaining how contextual factors in a country shape the institutional environment in legalizing entrepreneurial activities for women, especially the MFI institutional environment.