Comparing Refugees and South Africans in the Urban Informal Sector

From Center to Periphery and Back Again: A Systematic Literature Review of Refugee Entrepreneurship

“…This leads us to infer that refugee entrepreneurship has been stifled as a potential consequence of its peripherality, what Baker, Aldrich and Liou [128] have identified as a "thwarting of assumptions". Continuity in empirical work is low, as only a few authors have produced more than one contribution in relation to their examined populations (i.e., Gold [32,[66][67][68][69][70], Crush and colleagues [108,109], Kachkar and colleagues [83,84], as well as Wauters and Lambrecht [25,71,72]). Moreover, since central-peripheral publications recognizably encompass an important body in the field of migration studies, they contribute to maintaining refugee entrepreneurs as subjects of social studies rather than as agents of change in economies and entrepreneurship.…”

“…Three articles present comparative examinations of refugee entrepreneurship: Ranalli [123] compared the impact that local currencies can have in camps, taking inspiration from a case in the Netherlands and its applicability in Kenya; Elo and Vemuri [104] examined the contextual elements of self-organization, following experiences of migration in Israel, Germany, and the United States; while David and Coenen [126] explored country-specific encounters in the Netherlands and Germany. Each of these emphasizes the dearth of knowledge on comparative studies, as do authors who provide comparative insights on entrepreneurial refugee populations versus immigrant or native populations (e.g., [108,109]).…”

“…From the more social and economic aspects, refugees attempt to rebuild what they have lost from their COOs while nonrefugee immigrants aspire to economic and social advancement, and a better quality of life [34,86,109,117,129]. In these respects, among many more, refugees are subject to divergent forms of self-selection than other migrants and in turn, the underlying motivations influence other essential entrepreneurship aspects, including anticipation and preparation for migration, investment readiness, and a capacity to ferry both tangible and intangible assets to new CORs.…”

“…In addition, refugee entrepreneurs continue to report on the pivotal impact of language and communication barriers in CORs [12,78,96,104,107,114,116], a lack of business knowledge and access to capital [12,25,74,78,86,111,114,126], including finance [12,25,63,84,92,114], a lack of support resources, information and advice [12,104], a lack of formal education credential recognition in CORs [25], and a lack of understanding of the competition [81], as well as socio-political environments and contexts in which they find themselves [25,74,78,83,126,130]. Moreover, the cross-cultural challenges refugees face [74], including inequity [77,95,108,109,126], compounds the adversities they face with entrepreneurship.…”

“…"Blocked mobility" in a CORs' labor market has also been noted as a motivator for refugee entrepreneurship [97]. Moreover, not surprisingly, facilitating refugee entrepreneurship are access to capital, especially social capital [26,63,78,[107][108][109]112,114,119,121], and a COR's social acceptance of refugees [97,109,114].…”