Zimbabwe has experienced a sustained socio-economic crisis since 2000, creating a context in which adversity is chronic rather than episodic. Although entrepreneurial resilience has received increasing academic attention, limited research has examined how women entrepreneurs navigate entrepreneurship under conditions of prolonged crisis and gendered constraint. This study investigates how women entrepreneurs in Zimbabwe navigate entrepreneurship in this context and what their experiences reveal about the nature of entrepreneurial resilience.
The study adopted a social constructivist ontology and an inductive, interpretive qualitative design. A purposive sample of 30 women entrepreneurs operating in Zimbabwe's urban tourism sector was interviewed and data were analysed using the Gioia methodology.
Resilience unfolds through three interconnected processes: resilience building, resilience maintenance and resilience fracture. Women construct resilience through improvisational practices described locally as kukiya-kiya, sustain it through emotional and relational labour and experience strain when prolonged adaptation produces diminishing returns. Resilience fracture emerges not as singular breakdowns but as gradual erosion leading to recalibration, scaling down or temporary withdrawal rather than immediate exit.
This study reconceptualises resilience as a recursive, gendered, relational process through which enterprise continuity is continually reproduced under chronic adversity. It introduces kukiya-kiya as a culturally adaptive practice and theorises resilience fracture as an endogenous process through which prolonged adaptation erodes future adaptive capacity. By shifting resilience theorisation beyond episodic shocks and recovery-oriented assumptions, the study extends process-oriented resilience theory from a Global South context.
