Abstract
Entrepreneurial activities in rural context play a significant role in creating employment, food security, and general rural livelihood. However, gendered constraints to the disadvantage of women pose a huge constraint. Digitalization has significant possibilities to minimize these constraints. However, less has been documented on how digitalization addresses the gender constraints to enhance women’s engagement in rural entrepreneurship.
Using case study approach, documentary reviews, and authors’ viewpoints, this chapter explored how digitalization enhances rural women’s entrepreneurial engagements as well as how it addresses the gender constraints. We also mapped issues of rural urban divide and gender divide, in particular, which may stifle the potential benefits of digitalization.
Our findings revealed that digitalization enhances women engagement in rural entrepreneurship through diminishing socio-spatial challenges (gendered social and physical mobility). Nevertheless, these challenges are yet to be eliminated. Investments in digital technology in rural areas and addressing the gendered digitalization are among policy recommendations.
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Notes
- 1.
Statistics by International Telecommunication Union (ITU), available at https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx
- 2.
Consistently, sex-disaggregated data for SSA are not readily available. For example, only 11 countries out of 48 SSA countries in ITU World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators database have sex-disaggregated data. Further, these statistics cannot be easily comparable as the pace of updating them differs by country, where 2016 is the latest year for some countries’ reported statistics in UN agency for telecommunication (ITU). This may limit some potential usefulness, say at regional level. All EAC countries except Burundi did report data on individuals using the internet. Networked Readiness Index would be an alternative data source but the indicators are less comparable over time as they regularly change in structures. For example, the structure of 2019 is different from other years and thus difficult to undertake longitudinal analysis (https://networkreadinessindex.org/nri-2019-countries/)
- 3.
https://transformafricasummit.org/ [Accessed June 30, 2020]
- 4.
- 5.
https://transformafricasummit.org/ [Accessed June 30, 2020]
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Rutashobya, L.K., Chiwona-Karltun, L., Wilson, M., Ilomo, M., Semkunde, M. (2021). Gender and Rural Entrepreneurship in Digitizing Sub-Saharan Africa. In: Abugre, J.B., L.C. Osabutey, E., P. Sigué, S. (eds) Business in Africa in the Era of Digital Technology. Advances in Theory and Practice of Emerging Markets. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70538-1_5
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