Predominant theories in entrepreneurship fall short in adequately explaining entrepreneurial diversity (George et al., 2023; Verduijn and Essers, 2013), with a major gap existing especially between Western theoretical frameworks and observed phenomena in non-Western contexts (Wood et al., 2021; Ogbor, 2000). Western approaches and concepts often fail to capture business realities in non-Western contexts (Wickert et al., 2024; Bruton et al., 2022). In this regard, this Special Issue has been motivated by a lack of non-Western and indigenous theories to guide gender and entrepreneurship scholarship. We will use terms such as “non-Western” and “Global South” as shorthand. We do not wish to imply that countries and regions outside European and North American contexts are a monolithic or homogeneous block that are similar and totally comparable. We note nevertheless that so-called Western thinking in business and entrepreneurship has maintained epistemological and ontological dominance over non-Western countries (Muñoz and Kimmitt, 2018), most of which have been subjected to Western imperialism and are still exposed to Western hegemony.
At the heart of this failing is the presumed (Western) assumptions about the very nature of entrepreneurship, with still insufficient engagement with entrepreneurial pluralism (George et al., 2023. Many of these Western framings remain limited by normative expectations and representations surrounding growth-centric entrepreneurial activities. Entrepreneurship research emphasizes a “Silicon Valley entrepreneurship” type (Ben-Hafaiedeh et al., 2024) that revolves around high technology and high growth ventures that are started based on radical or disruptive innovations and require special research-focused ecosystems (Audretsch, 2021). This tech-centric model has become synonymous with entrepreneurship for policymakers and scholars alike, although, factually, it is an outlier and exception (Audretsch, 2021), and in this way research neglects entrepreneurial activities that do not fit the high-growth startup logic (Muñoz and Kimmitt, 2018). This high-growth logic is embedded within a rational-choice framework where the use of science and technology infrastructure and training are assumed to be pivotal to promoting entrepreneurship (Ogunsola et al., 2026).
The reliance on Western-based ontologies, epistemologies and teleologies has also advanced individualist, “objective science” perspectives of what counts as knowledge. In many cases, the push for entrepreneurship remains locked within the language of self-optimization (Bröckling, 2015) as a moral grammar of neoliberalism that becomes entangled within imperatives for social and economic organization within and beyond the Global North (Nehring et al., 2024). Here, entrepreneurship is regularly portrayed as an emancipating force (Rindova et al., 2009) and an empowerment tool (Wood et al., 2021; Buvinić and O'Donnell, 2019; Al Dajani and Marlow, 2014) for those who are willing to take the risks and to seize opportunities within the market. Yet, the inherent contradictions and biases within the stereotypical reference to masculine-type characteristics, individualism, profit-driven, risk-taking and aggression often reinforce this dominant framing of entrepreneurial masculinity (Jennings et al., 2016; Lumpkin and Dess, 1996; Marlow and McAdam, 2015). Women are negatively framed, on the other hand, as the “other” or the deficient entrepreneur, who does not possess what has been seen as established entrepreneurial characteristics and who is less suited for entrepreneurial business (Ahl and Marlow, 2021; Esnard, 2023; Marlow and Swail, 2014).
These logics fail to recognize the gendered realities on the ground that are often coupled with colonial histories that have reinforced patriarchal norms and oppressive systems for women (Imas and Garcia-Lorenzo, 2023). Within such misogynist and discriminating environments, entrepreneurship has become a necessity (and not a choice) for survival that is deeply ingrained in gender norms and that limit their engagement (Irene et al., 2021). These realities help us to understand why women are forced to work as necessity entrepreneurs in the informal economy, or are trapped in family businesses with few development perspectives; often unpaid/underpaid and disconnected from the male-dominated regular labor market (Ojediran and Anderson, 2020; Jayachandran, 2020; Irene et al., 2021). These observations have prompted the call for researchers at the intersection of gender and entrepreneurship to incorporate explorations of culture (Hechavarría et al., 2017), social structures and contexts (Marlow et al., 2009; Ahl, 2006), with needed theorizations that demonstrate the social embeddedness of startups (Shaw et al., 2017). This direction has been positioned as a way to locate the weight of collectivism (Wood et al., 2021), institutionalism (Morales et al., 2019; Urbano et al., 2019) and colonialism for work-life integration (Esnard, 2020, 2023) and entrepreneurial agency for women within constrained contexts (Refai et al., 2025).
Contextualizing gender and entrepreneurship
Hegemonic representations of entrepreneurship offer limited perspectives and theorizations from which global entrepreneurship can be framed and advanced as a phenomenon (Welter et al., 2016, 2017). These perspectives fall short in enhancing our understanding of entrepreneurial phenomena in non-Western, Global South, or indigenous contexts (Imas and Garcia-Lorenzo, 2023; Wood et al., 2021; Peredo and McLean, 2013). Welter et al. (2016) refer to a “critical mess” that necessitates recognizing and studying both the varied forms of entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial activities involved in creating and shaping contexts. Calls for more research contextualization have received increased scholarly attention over the past years, questioning the predominant entrepreneurial models and recognizing varied forms of entrepreneurship, as well as researching the diverse roles entrepreneurs play in constructing their environments (Ben-Hafaïedh et al., 2024; Welter and Gartner, 2016; Zahra et al., 2014).
Lesser-studied empirical contexts, in fact, offer multiple opportunities to extend and revise established theories as well as to provide compelling new theories (Shirokova et al., 2023; Bruton et al., 2008; Zahra, 2007). Such research helps us to understand the significance and impact of context, which has been demonstrated in diverse studies on women entrepreneurs in the Global South. Examples are Al Dajani and Marlow (2014), who explore the self-employment of Palestinian refugee women in Jordan as a strategy for individual empowerment and poverty alleviation. Yousafzai et al. (2019) who theorize on embedded female venturing in Nepal, where women negotiate constraints to their entrepreneurial agency imposed by patriarchy as well as cultural and social norms. Ojediran and Anderson (2020) underscore the socially embedded nature of entrepreneurship and demonstrate how formal and informal institutions in the Global South both reinforce gendered contexts and shape female venturing. Hashim et al. (2024) extend this type of research by using Ibn Khaldoun's theory coupled with Western family business concepts to highlight the challenges for women within Bahrain to exercise agency within family businesses.
These articles are examples of studies that contribute to develop local, non-Western understandings and theories on how women engage in entrepreneurship within highly gendered, patriarchal environments and how they strive to overcome deeply entrenched gender and social inequalities and disadvantages. Explorations of these realities in Global Southern contexts also deepen our understanding of how entrepreneurship perpetuates existing hierarchies, ideologies and inequalities that are rooted within colonial structures (Imas and Garcia-Lorenzo, 2023) and that have differently unfolded in more contemporary forms of dispossession and subjugation of local populations (Banerjee, 2011), especially women. This research helps to re-center often neglected voices, knowledge and practices from lesser-represented contexts and communities. Such shifts allow for a more visible embracing of theoretical diversity within entrepreneurial studies (Corbett et al., 2014). Indeed, it is the deeper insights into the nature, structural complexities and relational dynamics of a research context that offer the potential to provide more innovative and predictive explanations (Zahra, 2007).
However, there is a need for some caution in application. There is an abundance of entrepreneurship research which applies established theories of Western origin to explain entrepreneurial phenomena in non-Western settings (Jaim and Islam, 2018; Zahra, 2007). Such applications represent clear cases of epistemic injustice, where the intellectual domination of the Global North over the Global South (Özkasanc-Pan, 2008) continues even though it is acknowledged that underlying foundational contingencies of Western theoretical explanations cannot easily be transferred to developing nations and non-Western cultural contexts (Bruton et al., 2022; Wood et al., 2021). Explorations of post-colonial, feminist, intersectional and indigenous perspectives offer a way to advance existing scholarship and direction on women's entrepreneurship in the Global South. These are discussed in the sub-sections that follow.
Postcolonial feminist and intersectional theorizations
Postcolonial and feminist scholars have centered the need to locate the experiences of entrepreneurial women within historical and contemporary socio-cultural, economic and political contexts (See Ozkazanc-Pan, 2014, 2017; Ozkazanc-Pan and Muntean, 2022; Wadhwani et al., 2020). A core push has been for unpacking the historical assumptions that filter into the operationalizing of time and context in entrepreneurial research (Wadhwani et al., 2020).
Understanding the historical, structural and relational underpinnings of women entrepreneurs across the Global South remains central to this post-colonial agenda. Anderson and Ojediran (2022) center the need for explorations of women's experiences of entrepreneurship within emerging countries. Their work underscores the cultural and structural barriers to women's entrepreneurship, and in particular, patterns of restricted agency that significantly impact the. Using postcolonial and Pan-African feminist perspectives, Imas and Garcia-Lorenzo (2023) stress the still-weighted significance of colonial structures and patriarchal norms within Zimbabwe that disenfranchise women entrepreneurs, and that influence the experiences of struggle, resistance and resilience within entrepreneurship. Their work advocates for more context-specific research that captures some of the necro-capitalist practices that are nested within both colonial and neocolonial entanglements, and which impact entrepreneurial women differently within non-Western contexts. We see a similar argument from Omran and Yousafzai (2024), whose work on Palestinian women entrepreneurs demonstrates the ways in which structural and normative forms of discrimination differently position status, experiences, responses and outcomes. These complexities are captured within the cyclical relationship which exists between various components of epistemic injustice (operational/institutional, cultural and environmental), the divisive nature and outcomes of these realities, and (relatedly), the ways in which women resist and negotiate oppressive sites of engagement within the entrepreneurial space.
Caribbean scholarship also underscores the complexity of social structures, relations and identities, and the need to locate women entrepreneurs within the intersectional nodes of colonialism, imperialism, gender, race, class and culture. Barriteau (1994) makes visible the significance of the intersections of household relations, race and ethnicity for how women are positioned within the sector, and how these realities filter into their understanding and response to perceived risks and opportunities within the market. In making sense of these marginalized and precarious experiences, Browne (2001) moves beyond the necessity versus opportunity binary – inherent in Western framing of entrepreneurship – towards explorations that compare the demonstrative significance of, and complexities associated with, race, gender and history. Her work, based on a multi-site exploration of women entrepreneurs in Puerto Rico, Martinique and Barbados, offers an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural framing of entrepreneurship that differently locates the relevance and impact of colonial legacies across Spanish, French and English-speaking territories within the region. This direction aligns with the work of other Caribbean scholars who drive interrogations of post-colonial resistance, as well as realities of marginalized populations. This is also evident in the scholarship on Afro-Caribbean women entrepreneurs, in which researchers have traced notions of risk and success to the structural cultural underpinnings of labor market participation (Barriteau, 2001), family-work constraints and choices (Esnard, 2021, 2023).
Indigenous and communitarian theories
Several aspects of indigeneity and communitarianism have also emerged as critical areas that lack scholarship on women entrepreneurs. Scholars call for closer examinations of collective societies, and for deeper insights into the specific ways in which cultural norms and value systems impact the relational and experiential aspects of women's entrepreneurship within the Global South. For instance, Dana (2015) portrays indigenous entrepreneurship as an emerging field, where the value of kinship ties and of cultural values must be employed to fully capture the underlining of entrepreneurial activities. Through the centering of non-economic, community-based and cultural objectives, this work challenges the prioritization of the profit-maximization motif within entrepreneurship and highlights some of the social outcomes which shape how sustainability is implemented. Similarly, Zarafshani et al. (2008) speak to the relevance of cultural values and practices for indigenous women farmers in Iran. Using the Schwartz Values Scale, they locate the meaning and relevance of conformity, benevolence, self-direction and universalism for indigenous women farmers. Values of order, stimulation, hedonism, achievement and power were ranked as less important, indicating the differing values between indigenous and non-indigenous entrepreneurs. This collectivist focus also helps underscore the value of family systems, kinship patterns and cultural values as socially embedded factors that also shape entrepreneurial behavior.
Ubuntu has also been linked, for instance, as a critical connector between African beliefs, cultural orientations and entrepreneurial intentions. This philosophy is represented in the literature as a critical aspect of women's engagement, but also of the requirements needed to shift training and institutional support (Jaravasa et al., 2025). Researchers have been using the notion of Ubuntu to draw on cultural and technological innovations in South Africa, and on the significance of community-based knowledge systems within entrepreneurial patterns. For example, Abubaker et al. (2021) connect the significance of Ubuntu (as expressed in terms of values including humility, reciprocity and benevolence) to aspects of community organizing and digital entrepreneurial activities. These studies have been instrumental in directing attention to the importance of cultural and relational knowledge systems, which prioritize aspects of balance and collective empowerment, and shape entrepreneurial outcomes. Such explorations remain critical to the positioning of cultural value systems within the entrepreneurial process, and the consequently expanding global systems of knowledge and practice.
There is also a call for greater explorations of gender within communitarian micro-entrepreneurship, in order to better locate women's positioning, and how their experiences shape motivational and operational aspects of entrepreneurial ventures, specifically in tourism sectors (LaPan, 2014). This type of work clarifies the incompatibility of kinship, culture and community for indigenous groups, and the basic assumptions of mainstream entrepreneurial theories. These investigations facilitate more deliberate exploration of social justice issues within entrepreneurship, particularly in terms of gender, indigeneity, human rights and equity. These findings also draw attention to the relevance of policy, state and non-governmental organizations within specific industries (such as tourism) and on the need to reassess and reframe these entities' implementation of self-reliant development (LaPan et al., 2016). Additional scholars highlight the need to capture not simply the social value of entrepreneurship for indigenous groups, but also the transnational nature of their experiences (Sengupta et al., 2015). These realities signal a broader call for expanding the major parameters and understandings of entrepreneurship across contexts, in alignment with existing practices of development.
Call and response
Decolonizing scholarship on women's entrepreneurship in the Global South calls for explorations that challenge and transform dominant Western, colonial and patriarchal framing of African, Asian, Latin American and Caribbean contexts. This shift requires a comprehensive perspective that illustrates the historical and contemporary structures of power for formerly colonized nations. Such scholarship also calls for an exploration of the historical realities for women entrepreneurs within these contexts, and the ways in which colonial legacies have impacted agentic expression or acts of resistance. These inputs encourage researchers to adopt broader perspectives that not only historicize and question dominant categorizations, theorizations and representations within entrepreneurial studies, but also consider some of the circumstantial nuances that shape local entrepreneurial practices (Nason et al., 2025).
Decolonizing efforts and our own sensibilities in these matters have significantly shaped the basis and justification of this Special Issue. The contents herein advocate for an unseating of mainstream Western theories, serious questioning of dominant entrepreneurship narratives, and an increased exploration of local, indigenous and non-Western approaches, thereby expanding the understanding and practices of entrepreneurship. We have encouraged work that adopts non-Western feminist perspectives to highlight the historical, structural, cultural and relational frameworks impacting the subjective experiences and choices of women within non-Western contexts. This Special Issue highlights non-Western perspectives, given their superior ability to capture and explain the diverse lived experiences of women entrepreneurs in the Global South. The reframing of theoretical and empirical exploration is presented as essential alternatives of perspectives and transcends the prevailing dominance of neoliberal systems and ideologies.
We issued a call for papers in early 2024. Our call received 46 full paper submissions, with 23 submissions sent out for double-blind peer review, once filtered for alignment with the focus of the Special Issue. After the first round of reviews, 11 papers were granted revision and resubmission for inclusion in the Special Issue. The papers were subjected to various rounds of reviews, with 2–4 refinements as needed and with online publication in advance of the full Special Issue in 2026. Our final selection includes both conceptual and empirical papers that employ a range of methodological approaches (including interpretative phenomenology, ethnography, narrative inquiry, meta-synthesis).
Theoretically, these papers draw on diverse perspectives, including feminist standpoint theory, decoloniality, human security theory, intersectionality, Tuan's place-space dynamic, social learning theory, social capital, 5 and 7 M frameworks, as well as transnational feminism, to position the power-laden, relational and situated aspects of women's entrepreneurship. These theorizations have primarily been explored as an extension of existing Eurocentric framing, but with the added strength of reframing the concepts, arguments and units of analysis. Examples of this research include the interrogation of growth and market formulation of women's entrepreneurship, using an examination of social learning and social capital theory, the 5 and 7M framework, human security and intersectionality. Three of these papers use decolonial framing to critique existing theorizations of women's entrepreneurs in the Global South. Only one study centered decoloniality as part of the repositioning of women's entrepreneurship.
The papers also cover insights from Asian and African contexts, with critical treatments of knowledge as situated and plural, reframing theorizations for women entrepreneurs and rethinking or extending existing frameworks. Each paper offers a unique perspective on the issue of context, as discussed in the remainder of this Editorial. These orientations reject deficit-based framings, instead foregrounding lived experience, everyday practices and local meanings as sites of theory generation within examinations of Asian and African contexts.
Asian contexts: dialectic, restrictive and collective constraints
Six of the accepted papers within the Special Issue underscore the experiences and realities of women entrepreneurs within Asian contexts.
In Decolonizing Entrepreneurship: Navigating, Resisting and Transforming Patriarchy through Infrapolitics in Palestine and the Global South: A Systemic Review, Omran and Yousafzai (2025) discuss the use of infrapolitics to enable Palestinian women entrepreneurs in their navigation, resistance and transformation in the face of patriarchy. Their systematic review of 75 articles, published between 2003 and 2023, offers a thematic reframing of resistance within the entrepreneurial space. Central to this reframing is a deliberation of the significance of strategic disobedience, active negotiation, leveraging of social networks, bricolage and Islamic feminism. These emerge as five infrapolitical strategies utilized by Palestinian women to subvert patriarchal and institutional constraints. These infrapolitical strategies are presented as crucial, culturally rooted and contextually specific responses connecting aspects of feminism, decoloniality and displacement in entrepreneurial spaces. Their work includes the current discourse on culture, indigeneity, resistance and identity, in addition to the possibilities of using Islamic Feminism to decolonize women's entrepreneurship.
Basu's (2025) paper, “Navigating Exclusion: Women's Access to Credit and Indigenous Practices”, reviews the experiences of women who operate within the Handloom Family Enterprises in West Bengal, India. This study offers a critical review of the financial landscape in which these women are located, the limitations of formal financial systems and the primary importance of informal systems (such as moneylenders, community lending circles) to access and management of experiences within this space. Basu's work underscores the structural barriers to securing formal capital and credit, and the wider failures of the financial ecosystem which negatively impact women's operations within this sector. These structural factors are also linked to broader global-local tensions impacting declining production levels, stewardship of household enterprises and contributions to the gross domestic product. Such macro-micro complexities develop further with explorations of gender norms, the subsequent divisions of labor and the negative impacts on women's performance. In such contexts, this research illustrates the centrality of social and community-based capital to women's negotiation of the complex intersections of gender and the financial ecosystem.
“At the Threshold of enterprise: Understanding barriers to and supports of young Muslim women through interpretative phenomenology,” presents pre-start-up experiences for young Muslim women in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Through an integration of Tuan's space-place dynamics and feminist phenomenology, Savage et al. (2025) center the interplay of cultural practice, religion, family dynamics and entrepreneurial action. This approach extends and reframes understandings of entrepreneurship in non-Western contexts, refining barriers, supporting the entrepreneurial space and the integration of Islamic principles with understandings of entrepreneurship in the UAE. Crucial to this approach is an analysis of family relations, cultural and religious traditions and the significance of freedom and security for young Muslim women entrepreneurs within the UAE. By centralizing the role of cultural value systems and family systems within these women's perceptions and experiences, Savage, Alseyabi and Khan disrupt the individualistic assumptions and representations of general entrepreneurship scholarship, and better highlight the entrepreneurial thinking and practices of Muslim women. This reframing offers a unique opportunity to expand scholarship on women's motivations and resilience in relation to power structures and relational systems.
In Female Entrepreneurship in Restrictive Environments, Moustafa et al. (2025) use a conditional model, based on the conservation of resources theory, to demonstrate the ways technological proficiency shapes entrepreneurial success within restrictive collective societies. Using a three-wave, time-lagged survey with women entrepreneurs in Pakistan, the authors establish the relevance of personal capacities, institutional conditions and sociocultural legitimacy. These insights illustrate the weight and significance of multilevel resources (including technological innovation and social support) in gendered entrepreneurial contexts. By shifting towards collectivist, resource-constrained environments, this paper displays the significance of informal social and cultural mechanisms for entrepreneurial success. Such insights magnify the interconnections of socio-cultural legitimacy (entrepreneurial acceptance) and technological capacity (eg. digital skills and literacy) as key resources to entrepreneurial women in collective contexts.
The significance of the restrictive sociocultural environments is also central to Itani and Green's (2025) exploration of women's technology entrepreneurship. In extending the 5M framework, their work discusses the weight of “Motherhood,” not just as a core aspect of identity, but also as a strength of Lebanese mothers' engagement with technological entrepreneurship. Focusing on the opportunities which stem from the women's activities, their work expands notions of entrepreneurial success to include aspects of motherhood, service and social responsibility. This application of Islamic feminism emphasizes micro (eg. household and family dynamics), meso (eg. employee and customer relations) and macro factors (eg. community and societal development) in the understanding of motherhood and entrepreneurial activities. The authors also underline the significance of cultural identity, motherhood, community ties and gender roles to the strengths shaping entrepreneurial motivation. Here, the significance of family and social connections is located in the circle of influence embodied by responsibility, and the aggregate dimensions of entrepreneurial success. These insights humanize entrepreneurial activity and draw on aspects of reciprocity and collectivity within decisions on entrepreneurial engagement and success.
The unique entrepreneurial thinking and practices which filter back to theorizations of entrepreneurial women are also important to analyses of collective societies. This is achieved through the work of Maharaj (2026), in No woman is an Island: Navigating Entrepreneurial Barriers and Opportunities in a Collectivist Culture. Through her work, she underscores ongoing transformations in UAE society and the ways in which these changes alter existing systems and relations of power; a reality that uniquely shapes the activities of entrepreneurial women. Maharaj shows that while shifting ideologies encourage women's involvement in entrepreneurship, ongoing limitations rooted in patriarchal structures and systems shape their entrepreneurial efficacy and networking experiences. The notion of we-efficacy is presented as a collective framing of women's socio-cultural embeddedness and, relatedly, of their entrepreneurial trajectories. The framing of we-efficacy suggests that entrepreneurial confidence in collective settings is influenced by proximal relations with peers and family. This framing extends the work of Albert Bandura to locate the relevance of shared practice and relational ecosystems of entrepreneurial activities of women within the UAE.
African contexts: cultural, relational and transnational dynamics
Five articles in this Special Issue center women in African contexts, with specific focus on cultural, relational and transnational considerations.
The focus on Ubuntu as meaning-making and as reciprocal action remains critical to researchers' decolonizing of mainstream notions of entrepreneurial ecosystems and action. As captured in Mukasekuru and Vincze's (2026) paper on Entrepreneurship among women: The influence of Ubuntu philosophy, this work touches on the cultural significance of African philosophy to women's interpretation and entrepreneurial activity in Rwanda. More specifically, the paper pursues the significance of relational, social and cultural aspects of Ubuntu to community cooperation in entrepreneurial activities and experiences. Through this work, a cultural logic of reciprocity is linked to aspects of relational agency, motivation, opportunity and negotiation, bridging social networks and entrepreneurial activities. This grounding of cultural principles, experiences and outcomes in entrepreneurship is central to the author's expanding knowledge of women's entrepreneurship beyond Western ideologies and frameworks.
Akahome and Igwe's (2026) paper explores The influence of Indigenous social and cultural norms on Nigeria's women entrepreneurial practices. Using the 7 MS gender framework of women's entrepreneurship (money, market, motherhood, management, micro-environment, meso environment and mobilization of resources), the paper advances unique socio-cultural insights on the value of kinship ties and community values in rural entrepreneurial dynamics. This use of cultural theories in a communitarian framework offers unique insights on the value of solidarity and collective responsibility in Nigerian contexts. Similar to Mukasekuru and Vincze's (2026) paper, this study establishes the relevance of micro-meso-macro factors, in addition to examinations of the opportunities and constraints of these connections. Ubuntu is presented as a socially embedded demonstration of community-or solidarity-based cultural values that influence women's entrepreneurship. While kinship and collective empowerment are linked to shared success, the paper also highlights the ways in which these cultural, religious and market networks create informal resource-based opportunities, such as Ajo or Adeshe/Esusu (as traditional saving schemes) defining agency and wealth creation.
Raji et al. (2026) work on Informal Economy and Economic Security among Women engaging in Ogi Production in Selected Rural Communities in Kwara State, Nigeria, engages with aspects of poverty, security, informal activity and empowerment. This includes an exploration of the significance of Ogi production for women's economic security in rural communities, but also of the confines of this opportunity. The paper demonstrates Ogi production's emergence as a necessity-driven form of economic survival; it remains limited by its reliance on family labor and the use of the household as a site for production. These dual outcomes at the interface of production and household consumption are critical but underexplored aspects in the sustainability of informal enterprises. The paper's focus on human security helps extend the discussion on the limitations of human development and entrepreneurial policy. The findings also call for more critical interventions that build infrastructures and mechanisms to strengthen social protection and the sustainability of women entrepreneurs.
In From Nigeria to Canada, Oluwafemi et al. (2025), explore transnational feminist learnings in an intersectional framing of women entrepreneurship. Beyond examinations of motivation, the paper draws on the intersecting significance of race, culture, gender and transnational identities to contextualize the venture experiences of Nigerian women immigrants in Canada. The centering of transnational feminism, intersecting identities and bounded realities, offers unique insights into their experiences, persistence and resilience. The study's examination highlights the weight of racialized institutional barriers to Nigerian migrant entrepreneurs' access to mainstream financial networks, while managing family and work across borders. The authors suggest that this exploration of cultural capital, community logic and transactional networks in the local-global dynamics of entrepreneurial experiences. Such insights extend the conversation on entrepreneurial motivations (inclusive of self-actualization and cultural representation), towards the need for strategic interventions that address contextual factors, foster inclusivity and build on the potential of community-organizing and entrepreneurial support.
The final paper in this section tackles the longstanding structure/agency debate. In Kenyan agri-business women including small farmers in the value chain: Are they “agents of change”, Brouwer et al. (2026) discuss the integration of small farmers within the value chain. Through practices of inclusion (contract farming, training, logistic support and collective organizing) the authors outline the methods employed by Kenyan women as brokers, bridging small-scale farmers and commercial production. However, their work draws on the survival paradox and its inherent contradictions within this role and space. They demonstrate the fact that while Kenyan agri-business women successfully build trust and leverage in this value chain, they are unable to subvert more systemic and exclusionary structures of the broader market and society. These realities also underscore the wider structural (such as class, ethnicity and gender) and cultural (specifically, norms related to gender) barriers impacting agentic expression in community efforts and development.
Discussion and future directions
The Special Issue accentuates the need to capture and advance new ways of thinking, interpreting and representing women entrepreneurs in the Global South. It is essential to unsettle mainstream theorizations of women's entrepreneurship and to advance more nuanced explorations of the entrepreneurial experiences of women. In doing so, the Special Issue intends to support more novel scholarship of women's entrepreneurship, reframing entrepreneurial thinking, motivations, processes, actions and outcomes. For all the papers included in this Special Issue, women's entrepreneurship has been framed as a socially and culturally embedded process, influenced by macro-micro-meso factors within contexts. The papers center the complex connections between structure, culture and agency, in collective societies and/or in cooperative action, within the Global South. These thematic areas build on existing scholarship, connecting discursive and structural complexities to the cultural idiosyncrasies and subjugation of women entrepreneurs (see, eg. Ojediran and Anderson, 2020). These representations effectively investigate our approaches to the tensions between place, space and entrepreneurial outcomes for women in the Global South (Al-Dajani and Marlow, 2014).
These studies collectively draw on the foundational need to capture cultural diversity in entrepreneurial scholarship. In some cases, papers have focused on the cultural, institutional and transnational nature of commercial and social entrepreneurship and present a more situated way of thinking and doing entrepreneurship. This direction is consistent with a growing body of scholarship at the intersections of broader structural, cultural and relational factors (Muntean and Ozkazanc-Pan, 2016; Mulyono et al., 2025). Martinez-Dy and Susan Marlow (2017) commend this intersectional approach and advocate for deeper explorations that locate key aspects of positionality, propensity and performance in the complex web of social and cultural contexts. Yousafzai et al. (2019) also advance the need for further research on the contextual embeddedness of women's entrepreneurship to better situate their experiences, and the various strategies that are adopted to address their issues.
We are cognizant of the need for more comparative analyses within and across contexts to steady the weight of social and cultural contexts, and to contextualize the assumed work-family divide (Ahl et al., 2024). Scholarship in this area also reminds us that such analyses must include historical and contemporary challenges of social change and development, with consideration of the institutional and socio-cultural structures which shape entrepreneurial activities in the Global South (Esnard, 2023; Lassalle et al., 2023). These points of analysis can be used to extend existing knowledge regarding resilience-building across the Global South (with more within and between cross-country analyses, emphasis added), contributing significantly to global knowledge on entrepreneurship (Mulyono et al., 2025). Such contextual diversity, with attention to structural inequalities and hegemonic narratives, allows for a more inclusive and equitable understanding of entrepreneurship, propelling global dialog forward (Jones et al., 2025).
Our Special Issue contributes to decolonial research, including specific insights into the realities across Asian and African contexts. The high rate of paper submissions is encouraging. However, the papers represent a fragment of deeper and wider issues that unfold in a variety of ways across the diverse settings of the Global South and fundamentally require sustained theorizations. More work is therefore necessary to fully illustrate the realities of women entrepreneurs across the Global South. Existing analyses can be further developed to better capture the cases of entrepreneurial women who operate within Asia, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean territories. This presents a valuable opportunity to reposition global knowledge on entrepreneurial thinking and practices in an understanding of the majority world (Oppong and Dombroski, 2024), thereby establishing these representations at the heart of an epistemic agenda, speaking to the richness of global politics, economics and cultures. In such cases, explorations of entrepreneurship as empowerment must be identified and unraveled within the entanglements of colonial, post-colonial and geopolitical archetypes and in the lived realities that follow.
Unseating Western hegemonic perspectives requires scrutiny of the silences of how, where and whose knowledge is produced, represented and disseminated in relation to the Global South. Additional research is needed to address the paucity existing in non-Western countries, and to subsequently guide policy design and implementation (Derera and Mensah, 2023). Specific nuanced insights are still needed in many aspects of process, agency (Al-Dajani and Marlow, 2014) and the adequacy of empowerment strategies (Ojediran and Anderson, 2020). The goal of this is to ensure current scholarship moves beyond the proliferation and limitations of large-scale empirical studies and standardized measures (Henry et al., 2016). Future qualitative studies will better capture the nexus of institutional and cultural realities in these regions, and the processes influencing entrepreneurial activities. Mwila et al. (2024), for instance, call for more critical scholarship with a focus on the cultural expectations and roles underpinning constructions of motherhood and/or family within collective contexts, and its shaping of women's enterprise performance and livelihoods. Such scholarship aides wider understanding of women's complex intersections, including gender, ethnicity, age and lifecycle and how these realities shape the strategies they adopt to navigate the entrepreneurial landscape (Peiris, 2025).
There exists a vast amount of untapped potential research on community or solidarity-based models of entrepreneurial engagement, following deeper considerations of social networks and value systems. Existing work on women's agricultural development cooperatives and empowerment remains promising. Some of the emerging and still underexplored areas of this work involve situated or communal learning, particularly the connections between community, social capital and empowerment for marginalized rural women (Gokce and Yildiz, 2025). More research is necessary to capture the motivations and experiences of women in collective societies, where cooperation and self-help organizing have positively shaped their development and empowerment (Manimekalai and Rajeswari, 2002). For example, the role of grassroot movements, cooperative societies and knowledge building in the empowerment of women throughout Latin America and Africa has yet to be substantively explored (Wesley and Dublon, 2015; Gupta, 2013). This unexplored potential could also include the case of the Caribbean, where saving schemes or rotating credit systems have positively shaped the social economies of women (Fiszbein and Lowden, 1999; Sam, 2015; Hossein, 2015).
This Special Issue contributes to the aforementioned unfinished agendas, while also highlighting the hegemony in the literature and the risk/fear of moving outside Western frameworks and theorizations. This reality flags the gulf of knowledge(s) between the current cannon and communities which are un-/under-represented, and could significantly contribute to research, funding modeling and enterprise success, benefiting us all. Recent calls for intellectual activism across the board represent a variety of life/home/societal patterning (Bosch et al., 2025) and conferences shaped around the “Voices from the Margins” (Qazaqhstan, November 2025) reflect the increasing importance of capturing the plurality and diversity of these voices within entrepreneurial scholarship (Banerjee, 2022). We hope for more sustained scholarship that further advances this field and centers diverse knowledge, practices and outcomes for entrepreneurial women across the globe. More integrated or eclectic approaches (such as postcolonial and Marxist feminist theorizations) are also needed to better understand the nature of entrepreneurship in diverse nations, while avoiding some of the harmful effects of acontextual applications (Koldsø and Widén, 2021). This area of work highlights the need to rethink and recognize the value of collective and cultural practice in women's entrepreneurship, as well as the need for more just and inclusive entrepreneurial systems around the world (see Yousafzai et al., 2022).
While we have used the collective contributions of these papers to map out the interplay of context and entrepreneurship in our Special Issue (Ben-Hafaiedh et al., 2024), the strong response to this call suggests that more effort, opportunities and outlets are needed to drive this epistemic agenda further into entrepreneurial studies. We see the need for increased exploration, grounded in alternative or extended theorization, a challenge to dominant theories, assumptions, framings and expectations surrounding women's entrepreneurship. A central aspect of the development of this work is the historicizing and politicizing of gender and market research, sharpening the recognition of colonial structures, ideologies, narratives and subjugations, and their relation to gender and entrepreneurship. Such complexities require nuanced conceptualizations and theorizations (eg. post-colonial feminist, decoloniality, southern theory) that challenge homogeneous categorizations and representations and expand women's contributions to include more collective and cooperative enterprises, as well as informal or community-embedded or care-based economic practices.
These directions necessitate more decolonial methodologies that reposition local, indigenous and community-based knowledge as lived experiences for theory-generation and actor-liberation from, and for, the majority worlds. This type of research remains critical to how we reframe the language of entrepreneurial thinking/activity, and how we recognize and value alternative indicators of entrepreneurial success, such as autonomy and resilience. The advancements in academic research on entrepreneurship support the shift of entrepreneurial inquiry on women's entrepreneurship, interrogation and expansion of core concepts and the disruption of hegemonic representations within that process. This Special Issue on “Unseating Western Hegemonies in Contextualized Research about Gender and Entrepreneurship” supports this important point of change and action within the field. The Special Issue also highlights the promising areas of research and pathways open to this within entrepreneurial studies. Its contents underscore features of the work required to undo colonial academic norms in women's entrepreneurial research, and the inclusion of alternative voices and theories within the field. We are grateful to the International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship for their receptivity to this crucial work, and we invite others to add to this much-needed area of scholarship.
