Female Entrepreneurship in Uganda: Manoeuvring gendered spaces

Abstract

Sub-Saharan Africa is a region currently facing the problem of sufficient job creation due to the young population steadily entering the labour market. A key role can be played by women, who seize economic opportunities and contribute to essential job creation through their entrepre-neurial activities. Sub-Saharan African countries, and Uganda in particular, have the highest entrepreneurship rates in the world. In fact, more women than men engage in entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, women in Uganda also spend twice as much time on unpaid care work, putting them in a disempowered position vis-à-vis men. As a result, promoting female entrepreneurship has become a key policy focus of national governments and international development organi-sations. It is intended to support the equal participation of women in productive employment and correspondingly foster their empowerment process. Therefore, this thesis explores the em-powering effects of female entrepreneurship and the contributions of national governments and cooperation agencies.

The thesis is based on a policy analysis consisting of the strategies of the Ugandan government as well as the measures of the Women Entrepreneurship for Africa (WE4A) programme of the German development agency GIZ to analyse contextual obstacles in the empowerment process. The study offers an outlook on policy implications and measures for possible application in future programs. Beyond that, it uncovers sociocultural norms that influence the empowerment process through an in-depth qualitative analysis of ten interviews with female entrepreneurs and selected experts. The study offers insight into the empowerment process triggered by wom-en's entrepreneurship by reporting on individual experiences and social practices regarding the gendered division of unpaid care and household tasks. In doing so, areas of women's agentic independence and their contribution to the collective empowerment process are explored. The study highlighted the multidimensionality of the empowerment process and addressed women's views and interpretations of empowerment through entrepreneurship. The findings revealed both empowering effects for women entrepreneurs and remaining challenges due to discrimi-natory structures and entrenched power dynamics.