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Even with the increased number of women enterprises and efforts to help women entrepreneurs in Africa exploit the potential benefits globalization, gender inequalities (perception and treatment of women in Africa) still stand in their way.   This paper seeks to address three questions:  First, what the literature suggests with respect to re-thinking alternative analytical approaches to a new understanding of globalization, entrepreneurship and gender equality in global commerce.  This will be followed by the question on how Africa conceptualizes women entrepreneurship and lastly, if the current African conceptualization of women entrepreneurs could precipitate exploitation of opportunities that the emerging global order presents.  The literature suggests that women still have a long way to go in changing environmental forces and perceptions to fully exploit their potential in the global stage.  A new theoretical way of analyzing their progress is imperative.

Financial technology companies (FinTechs) have taken to digitalisation both to understand their customers and to use data to design more productive and convenient products. As a result, they are credited with making financial resources increasingly available and affordable. In Africa, millions of people use a vast array of proliferating mobile platforms as transactional interfaces. Although these innovations have improved the ease of financial transactions, they are not without challenges. In this paper, we explore digitalisation and financial governance in Africa. We identify the current state of knowledge and explicate how this understanding has been applied on the continent. Finally, we specify existing knowledge gaps in areas that could form the basis of a future research agenda for practitioners and policymakers.

As the fourth industrial revolutions technologies intensify, cities are becoming smarter, new business models are emerging and informal enterprises are formalizing by default. Research demonstrates that the future of our world is decided by the quality of its future cities. As cities invest in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and embrace the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies to make life easier and solve many of the problems we face today, employment opportunities expand and citizens enjoy better lifestyle. This chapter will examine how the concept of smart cities is disrupting existing business models and creating new ones that have positively impacting Africa’s informal enterprise sector. The chapter leverages abundance theory to explain the emerging phenomenon in the nexus between smart cities, new business models and informal enterprises in Sub-Saharan Africa. The study finds that indeed the concept of smart cities is indeed facilitating new business models that are formalizing the informal sector.

In spite of firm innovativeness being identified as essential for growth, there exists a dearth of studies that relate entrepreneurial orientation and innovativeness in manufacturing small and medium enterprises in the developing world. In this article, we unpack the dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation and examine their influence on innovativeness of manufacturing small and medium manufacturing enterprises. This was a cross sectional survey with a stratified sample size of 363 firms.   Regression models were used to validate the derived hypothesis. We discuss the implications of the results which show that the dimensions were individually not found to have a significant effect on innovation but yet entrepreneurial orientation had an influence on firm innovativeness. We identify the need for additional studies to broaden the scope of future studies across several geographies. We conclude by challenging the ever-dynamic local institutional policies that have not had a significant impact on the effect of entrepreneurial orientation on innovativeness of SMEs across many developing countries.