Young Entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa

Katherine V. Gough, Thilde Langevang, Katherine V. Gough, Thilde Langevang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317548362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Young people in sub-Saharan Africa are growing up in rapidly changing social and economic environments which produce high levels of un- and underemployment. Job creation through entrepreneurship is currently being promoted by international organizations, governments and NGOs as a key solution, despite there being a dearth of knowledge about youth entrepreneurship in an African context.

This book makes an important contribution by exploring the nature of youth entrepreneurship in Ghana, Uganda and Zambia. It provides new insights into conceptual and methodological discussions of youth entrepreneurship as well as presenting original empirical data. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative research, conducted under the auspices of a collaborative, interdisciplinary and comparative research project, it highlights the opportunities and challenges young people face in setting up and running businesses. Divided into a number of clear sections, each with its own introduction and conclusion, the book considers the nature of youth entrepreneurship at the national level, in both urban and rural areas, in specific sectors - including mobile telephony, mining, handicrafts and tourism - and analyses how key factors, such as microfinance, social capital and entrepreneurship education, affect youth entrepreneurship.

New light is shed on the multi-faceted nature of youth entrepreneurship and a convincing case is presented for a more nuanced understanding of the term entrepreneurship and the situation faced by many African youth today.

This book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars interested in youth entrepreneurship, including in development studies, business studies, youth studies and geography, as well as to development practitioners and policy makers.

The Open Access title has now been added to the Open Access page.

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1 Introduction

Youth entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa

Katherine V. Gough and Thilde Langevang

DOI: 10.4324/9781315730257-1

Introduction

Young people are highly visible throughout urban and rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, engaging in a wide range of income-generating activities. Young women operating from open-sided shacks or tabletops can be seen selling a range of goods from fruit and vegetables to cosmetics, and offering services such as plaiting hair and sewing clothes. Young men more commonly deal in manufactured goods, including electronic gadgets, and offer services such as car washing and charging mobile phones, though they are also increasingly entering into former female domains (Overå, 2007). These young people are predominant among the “ordinary” entrepreneurs of the global South (Jeffrey & Dyson, 2013) proving themselves skilful at finding economic niches, managing scarce resources, and seizing profitable opportunities within constrained economic environments.

Economic restructuring and the transformation of labour markets have resulted in limited employment opportunities for young people whose unemployment rates can be two to three times higher than the norm (World Bank, 2012). Young people are often depicted as having become increasingly marginalised, causing idleness and frustration which, it is believed, can lead to involvement in crime, organised violence, and protests (Garcia & Fares, 2008; World Bank, 2006, 2012).¹ Consequently, entrepreneurship is increasingly being promoted as a key tool to combat the youth unemployment crisis and as one of the main drivers of economic and social transformation in sub-Saharan Africa (Africa Commission, 2009; World Bank, 2006). In light of their limited possibilities to gain formal sector jobs in the public or private sector, young people are being encouraged to be “job creators” rather than “job seekers”, thus becoming self-employed “entrepreneurs” (Langevang & Gough, 2012).

Despite the increasing focus on youth entrepreneurship, little is known about who the young entrepreneurs are, which activities they engage in, the challenges they face, and their aspirations. This book aims to fill this gap by presenting detailed studies of the experiences of young entrepreneurs in a range of settings in sub-Saharan Africa. As well as presenting original empirical data, it also contributes to discussions regarding the concept of entrepreneurship and methodological approaches to studying youth entrepreneurship. The book is the principal outcome of a four-year research project titled “Youth and Employment: The Role of Entrepreneurship in African Economies” (YEMP), which explored youth entrepreneurship in Ghana, Uganda, and Zambia. An interdisciplinary team of 20 researchers from geography, business studies, and development studies worked collaboratively, conducting both quantitative and qualitative research. In this book, we analyse the nature of youth entrepreneurship at the national level in both urban and rural areas and in specific sectors, and show how it is affected by key factors including microfinance, social capital, and entrepreneurship education. We illustrate the multifaceted nature of youth entrepreneurship and argue for a more nuanced understanding of the term “entrepreneurship” and the situation faced by many African youth today.

Conceptualising and linking youth and entrepreneurship

Youth and entrepreneurship are both highly debated concepts. The most common way of defining youth is by chronological age, such as the United Nations’ categorisation of youth as 15–24-year-olds. Many sub-Saharan African countries, however, define youth in more expansive terms, pushing the ceiling into the mid-30s (Chigunta, Schnurr, James-Wilson, & Torres, 2005). Consequently, in this project, we conducted research with young people aged between 15 and 35 years. Youth is clearly more than an age bracket, however, and there are numerous ways of conceptualising the term. Two key perspectives are the life-stage – otherwise known as the youth transitions – perspective, and the youth culture perspective (Christiansen, Utas, & Vigh, 2006; MacDonald et al., 2001).

Life-stage or youth transition studies characterise youth as a distinct stage between childhood (a phase of dependence and immaturity) and adulthood (a phase of independence and maturity). Youth is depicted as a stage through which people pass in order to become mature, independent adults (Skelton, 2002). Transition studies, however, have been criticised for failing to comprehend young people’s complex life paths in times of rapid socioeconomic change, and for reducing youth to a transitory state of becoming “rather than a recognized stage in its own right with distinctive experiences and issues” (Skelton, 2002: 103). The transitions that have traditionally been associated with growing up, such as finding a job, leaving home, getting married, and becoming a parent, may in fact occur simultaneously or not at all, and many of them are reversible (Johnson-Hanks, 2002; Valentine, 2003). This is especially true in sub-Saharan Africa where rather than passing through neat, linear life-stages, young people traverse back and forth between fluid boundaries of time- and place-specific notions of childhood, youth, and adulthood (Burgess, 2005; Christiansen et al., 2006; Honwana & De Boeck, 2005; Johnson-Hanks, 2002; Langevang, 2008; van Blerk, 2008).

In contrast, cultural approaches to youth focus on young people’s here-and-now lived experiences, with a particular interest in their sub-cultures and styles. This perspective sees young people as a socially and culturally demarcated group with distinctive views and experiences. While recognising the importance of understanding how youth experiences vary across different cultures, the cultural approach has been criticised for focusing on deviant, spectacular, and male youth, and for analysing young people’s agency in isolation from the surrounding society (Valentine, Skelton, & Chambers, 1998). These studies of youth cultures have been dominated by research in northern contexts, especially Britain and the United States, with few studies conducted in sub-Saharan Africa.

The life-stage/transitions approach and the cultural approach, however, are not mutually exclusive and the two can be usefully combined. As Christiansen et al. (2006) argue, understanding the lives of young people is a question of combining an analysis of how young people see and interpret the world, and how they are positioned within it through their families and societies. This requires focusing simultaneously on young people’s agency and how they are restricted by their environments to show how “youth are able to move, what they seek to move towards and the ways external forces seek to shape their movements” (Christiansen et al., 2006: 16). This is the approach this book adopts.

During the past decade, there has been an upsurge of research highlighting the diversity and multiplicity of young people’s trajectories and lived experiences in a range of settings in sub-Saharan Africa (see, among others, Ansell, van Blerk, Hajdu, & Robson, 2011; Burgess, 2005; Camfield, 2011; Christiansen et al., 2006; Darkwah, 2013; Day & Evans, 2015; Esson, 2013; Gough, 2008; Hajdu, Ansell, Robson, & van Blerk, 2013; Honwana, 2012; Honwana & De Boeck, 2005; Kristensen & Birch-Thomsen, 2013; Langevang, 2008; Mains, 2012; Porter et al., 2010; Ralph, 2008; Sommers, 2012; Thorsen, 2013; van Blerk, 2008; Weiss, 2009). As these studies highlight, young people’s lived experiences vary greatly according to gender, socioeconomic status, education, and place. In this book, we add to this literature by examining how youth entrepreneurship varies by social differences, highlighting both similarities and differences between youth in a range of settings.

Turning to entrepreneurship, the word stems from the French word entreprendre, which means “to begin something” or “to undertake”. The role of the entrepreneur was first recognised in the 18th century by the economist Richard Cantillon, whose research provided the basis for three major economic traditions (Hébert & Link, 1989). The first was the German tradition dominated by the research of Schumpeter (1934/1983) who saw entrepreneurship as key to economic development and entrepreneurs as extraordinary individuals who introduced new products or processes, identified new markets or sources of supply, or developed new types of organisations. The second, the Chicago tradition led by Knight (1921/2012), saw entrepreneurs as risk takers and argued that opportunity for profit arose because of the uncertainty surrounding change. The third, the Austrian tradition, was proposed by Kirzner (1978), who considered the entrepreneur somebody who was alert to profitable opportunities for exchange that occurred due to information gaps in the market, which they were able to identify because they had superior knowledge.

To date, most entrepreneurship research has been dominated by an economic discourse and focused on elite businesses in the global North (Gough, Langevang, & Owusu, 2013). More recently, however, in line with Steyaert and Katz’s (2004) notion of entrepreneurship as an “everyday societal phenomenon”, there has been a widening of the domains, spaces, and discourses of entrepreneurship. Consequently, entrepreneurship is seen as an activity not restricted to a select few individuals but one in which “ordinary” individuals engage. This is the approach adopted in this book where entrepreneurship is seen as spotting and seizing an opportunity to establish a business and, in the process, taking risks and managing the available resources creatively.

We focus in particular on the process-oriented character of entrepreneurship – “entrepreneuring” – which is seen as a practice that affects and is affected by the economic, social, institutional, and cultural environment (Steyaert, 2007), highlighting how different actors, forms, practices, and discourses of entrepreneurship emerge in differing societal contexts. As Baumol (1990: 898) notes, the rules for entrepreneurship “change dramatically from one time and place to another” and context is vital for understanding “when, how, and why entrepreneurship happens and who becomes involved” (Welter, 2011: 166). Hence, although conventional theories of entrepreneurship have tended to focus on the isolated individual entrepreneur, there is now growing acknowledgement that entrepreneurial behaviour must be understood within its historical, temporal, spatial, institutional, and social context (Welter, 2011).

While research on entrepreneurship has been dominated by experiences from the global North, in recent years there has been an upsurge in research on entrepreneurship in the global South – including Africa – spearheaded by Spring and McDade’s (1998) pioneering book, African Entrepreneur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Table Of Contents
• Young Entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa
• 1 Introduction: youth entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa
• Part I National studies of youth entrepreneurship
• Introduction to Part I
• 2 Youth entrepreneurship trends and policies in Uganda
• 3 Youth entrepreneurship in Ghana: current trends and policies
• 4 Measuring and promoting youth entrepreneurship in Zambia
• Concluding comments to Part I
• Part II Youth entrepreneurship in urban settlements
• Introduction to Part II
• 5 Young entrepreneurs in Lusaka: overcoming constraints through ingenuity and social entrepreneurship
• 6 Youth entrepreneurship in Kampala: managing scarce resources in a challenging environment
• 7 Prospects and challenges of youth entrepreneurship in Nima-Maamobi, a low-income neighbourhood of Accra
• Concluding comments to Part II
• Part III Youth entrepreneurship in rural areas
• Introduction to Part III
• 8 Mobile rural youth in northern Ghana: combining near and distant opportunity spaces
• 9 Rural youth entrepreneurship in eastern Uganda
• 10 Rural youth in northern Zambia: straddling the rural–urban divide
• Concluding comments to Part III
• Part IV Youth entrepreneurship in specific sectors
• Introduction to Part IV
• 11 Young entrepreneurs in the mobile telephony sector in Ghana
• 12 Youth entrepreneurship in a small-scale gold mining settlement in Ghana
• 13 Young female entrepreneurs in Uganda: handicraft production as a livelihood strategy
• 14 Employment in the tourism industry: a pathway to entrepreneurship for Ugandan youth
• Concluding comments to Part IV
• Part V Stimulating youth entrepreneurship
• Introduction to Part V
• 15 Social capital among young entrepreneurs in Zambia
• 16 Innovative approaches by Ugandan microfinance institutions to reach out to young entrepreneurs
• 17 Entrepreneurship education in Uganda: impact on graduate intentions to set up a business
• Concluding comments to Part V