Entrepreneurship and Poverty Alleviation: The Importance of Health and Children’s Education for Slum Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Research has focused on the role of entrepreneurial action in alleviating poverty. However, there is a gap between individuals’ short-term outcomes from entrepreneurship overcoming immediate resource concerns and the large-scale impact of entrepreneurship on institutional and system change. Therefore, in this study, we explore entrepreneurs’ beliefs about how entrepreneurial action can alleviate poverty. To do so, we conducted a qualitative study of entrepreneurs of businesses located in Indian slums and identified the impact of expectations, role models, and the subjective value of their children’s education in attempts to alleviate poverty.

Entrepreneurial Workaround Practices in Severe Institutional Voids: Evidence From Kenya

“…Through these practices, we show that these entrepreneurs act as microinstitutional agents (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009) and contribute to filling existing voids by laying the foundations of their country's institutional infrastructure while pursuing their commercial goals. Second, we advance our scholarly understanding of entrepreneurial theories 'in context' (Shepherd, Parida & Wincent, 2020;Welter, 2011) and, in particular, of how and why social and commercial goals become intertwined in nascent entrepreneurship (Wry & York, 2017; in Africa (George et al, 2016a;Zoogah et al, 2015) none of the entrepreneurs in our study identified as a social entrepreneur, and yet, the dissatisfaction generated by the severe institutional voids they faced heightened their awareness of societal needs, thus motivating them to pursue dual goals simultaneously.…”

Social Entrepreneurship and Scaling Strategies for Poverty Alleviation

“…Despite scholars recently recognized the importance of entrepreneurs and social enterprises to fight poverty (Bruton et al 2013;World Bank 2018;Sutter et al 2019;Shepherd et al 2020;Lashitew et al 2020), literature on successful strategies is still young. In particular, definitional issues on what really mean to scale BoP social enterprises are only recently tackled (Islam 2020;Ciambotti et al 2020), while the various challenges and approaches to operate in BoP found fertile ground in academic research since several decades.…”

“…Finally, very recently studies on BoP 3.0 (Cañeque and Hart 2015; Dembek et al 2020) opened to "a more holistic and collaborative process of poverty alleviation whereby development is seen as transformation rather than just economic growth" (Chmielewski et al 2020, p. 213). This pathway of development in the studies on business, entrepreneurship, and poverty alleviation also is entitled in many recent literature reviews (Dembek et al 2020;Sutter et al 2019;Shepherd et al 2020).…”

“…In order to fight these challenges, BoP social enterprises are usually pulled to seek out locally embedded agents and individuals to tap BoP communities, in particular way by customizing the approaches toward the poor (Kistruck et al 2013;Lashitew et al 2020;Shepherd et al 2020), for instance through customized product distribution as a direct-to-home approach (Gebauer et al 2017). Heeding this, embeddedness and networking with local communities play a critical role in the success of BoP social enterprises (Mohr et al 2012;Calton et al 2013;Dembek et al 2020).…”

“…For this reasonespecially when the social enterprise aims to scale through diversificationthe organization should keep in attention in maintaining the focus on poor while achieving the dual mission (Ciambotti et al 2020;Lashitew et al 2020;Shepherd et al 2020;Doherty et al 2020). The companies that effectively combine social impact scaling strategies with increases in financial sustainability can really change the life of million of poor, thereby contributing to eradicate poverty.…”