Doing Entrepreneurship in Uganda:
the social construction of gendered
identities of male and female
entrepreneurs
Julius F. Kikooma (Ph.D)
School of Psychology
Makerere University
Why a study on doing entrepreneurship?
• In Africa, years of data on entrepreneurship
sends clear message to policy makers that the
top four problems facing entrepreneurship in
Africa are:
– a low level of overall education and training;
– social factors that do not encourage
entrepreneurship as a career path of choice;
– lack of access to finance, particularly in the
micro-financing arena; and
– a difficult regulatory environment.
• It is a refrain that GEM researchers have been
singing for many years.
Dissemination of Research Findings Workshop - presentation by jkikooma
2
In Uganda
• The overall perception is still negative and
the policies and programmes have not been
sufficiently well targeted.
• In an international comparison, Uganda is
still underdeveloped in terms of physical
and commercial infrastructure.
• A strong entrepreneurial spirit is wasted if
the conditions handicap entrepreneurs in
trying to compete at a global level.
Dissemination of Research Findings Workshop - presentation by jkikooma
3
Why the gender dimension?
• In Uganda, women account for an increasing
share of the self-employed, especially in small
business sector and there is a growing
recognition of the role the sector play in
building the country’s economy.
• Yet women’s progress in business ownership
remains virtually invisible while a few
demographic differences between men’s and
women’s businesses are documented.
Dissemination of Research Findings Workshop - presentation by jkikooma
4
What is the problem?
• Explanations of entrepreneurial experiences remain
largely rooted in orthodox perspectives focused on
comparisons of male and female entrepreneurs.
• Yet, such an approach does not illuminate how and
why entrepreneurship came to be defined and
understood in relation to the behaviour of only men.
• Therefore, despite the entrepreneurship literature’s
vastness and depth, there is a gap between women’s
experiences of the phenomenon and what
explanations traditional research is producing in
academic settings.
Dissemination of Research Findings Workshop - presentation by jkikooma
5
Approach to the study
• Influenced by the narrative turn and
encouraged by pioneers who have proposed
alternative approaches to studying
entrepreneurial practices, this study adopted
a novel conceptual lens through which to
approach research on the phenomenon of
entrepreneurship.
• The lens frames entrepreneurship as being
socially constructed.
Dissemination of Research Findings Workshop - presentation by jkikooma
6
Social construction of entrepreneurship
• This standpoint suggests that gender and
entrepreneurship are enacted and situated
practices, and shows how the codes of a
gendered identity are kept, changed and
sometimes challenged.
• This suggests that as well as being an economic
phenomenon, entrepreneurship can also be read
as a cultural one in order to understand how
gender and entrepreneurship are culturally
produced and reproduced in social practices.
Dissemination of Research Findings Workshop - presentation by jkikooma
7
Methodology
• A narrative type of inquiry was chosen
because its theoretical assumptions
resonate with the current study’s definition
of entrepreneurship.
• A choice was made to undertake a narrative
inquiry because of three contributions that
such an approach has been observed to
make to research studies that emphasize
interpretation, rather than prediction.
Dissemination of Research Findings Workshop - presentation by jkikooma
8
Methodological Assumptions
• the stories entrepreneurs tell about their experiences
in their entrepreneurial activities give us access to the
arguments, intentions, and meanings that support
entrepreneurship (narrative as language).
• entrepreneurship as practice is a legitimate source of
knowledge from which to draw lessons about
entrepreneurship, which can then be applied to other
contexts (narrative as knowledge)
• even though an entrepreneur may actively resist
societal structures of power, those structures may
influence their work, producing incongruence
between discourse and practice (narrative as
Dissemination of Research Findings Workshop - presentation by jkikooma
9
metaphor).
Entrepreneurial stories and the negotiation of
entrepreneurial identities
• Case stories in the study fell into
three main categories:
• bigmanship,
• African woman, and
• cultural entrepreneurship stories.
Dissemination of Research Findings Workshop - presentation by jkikooma
10
Bigmanship
• This was a category of stories of a
culturally idealized form of masculine
character.
• Such stories came in two forms:
• hegemonic masculinity
• gender neutrality
Dissemination of Research Findings Workshop - presentation by jkikooma
11
‘African woman’ stories
• These were women entrepreneurs’
stories of challenges, perseverance
and triumph
• These stories came in two forms:
• gendered identity and
• manoeuvring space stories.
Dissemination of Research Findings Workshop - presentation by jkikooma
12
Cultural entrepreneurship stories
• provide narratives that tell of the meanings
that entrepreneurs attach to, and the
strategies for, success they adopt.
• the precursors to tangible business outcomes
were a mixture of a number of actors, action
processes and events, as well as chance.
Dissemination of Research Findings Workshop - presentation by jkikooma
13
Conclusion
• Although entrepreneurship can take various
implicit and explicit forms, it is the case that
gender struggle is integral to entrepreneurs’
expressions of gender relations in Uganda.
Indeed, one may even characterize some of
the female entrepreneurs’ struggles as efforts
to push the cultural boundaries in their quest
for wealth-creation.
Dissemination of Research Findings Workshop - presentation by jkikooma
14
…and finally?
• It is my hope that this work will advance the
understanding of the needs of aspiring and
existing female entrepreneurs, and will
provide policy insights useful to developing
and enhancing an environment in which the
spirit of women’s entrepreneurship may
flourish.
Dissemination of Research Findings Workshop - presentation by jkikooma
15