Driving factors and sources of capital for immigrant entrepreneurs in Ghana

Elijah Yendaw ()
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Elijah Yendaw: SD Dombo University of Business and Integrated Development Studies

Journal of Global Entrepreneurship Research, 2022, vol. 12, issue 1, 53-69

Abstract: Abstract Over the past few years, the phenomenon of immigrant entrepreneurship has attracted overwhelming research curiosity in West Africa. However, scholarships about the entrepreneurial entry motivations of West African itinerant immigrant retailers and their sources of start-up capital are still nascent issues. Employing a cross-sectional concurrent embedded mixed methods design, this paper surveys the driving factors and sources of funding for 779 immigrant entrepreneurs and interviews nine immigrant key informants in the Accra Metropolis of Ghana. The results indicate that most of the immigrants entered into their itinerant retail businesses mainly because of their inability to secure alternative livelihood for survival in the labor market. The study further found that about a third of the immigrants financed their itinerant retail businesses using earnings from the sale of credited wares from their fellow entrepreneurs from the same ethnic group. These findings underscore the utility of ethnic networking as a resource in establishing immigrants’ businesses. Being mostly necessity-driven entrepreneurs, policy measures should be aimed at enrobing them into the tax bracket rather than rid them of the informal retail sector.

Keywords: Driving factors; Sources of capital; Immigrant entrepreneurship; West Africa; Ghana (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1007/s40497-022-00314-4

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