Analysis of Ghana's and South Africa's women's entrepreneurship policies

Abstract

Globally, women's entrepreneurship confronts multifaceted barriers that call for policymakers' attention. There is also a paucity of research on women's entrepreneurship policies in Ghana and South Africa, the focus of this study, which addresses two research questions. First, what kind of women's entrepreneurship policies exist in each of these two countries? Second, to what extent do the policies of each country address the normative, cultural-cognitive and regulatory institutional policy requirements? Drawing on the transformative research paradigm, we conducted content analysis of 25 purposively sampled policy instruments using an analytical framework developed from Scott's institutional policy framework. Our results reveal that, although both countries have normative, cultural-cognitive and regulatory women's entrepreneurship policies, Ghana's policy prescriptions are limited and fragmented while South Africa's policies are comprehensive and co-ordinated with other national policy and strategic documents. This study contributes to entrepreneurship research by applying institutional theory to the analysis of women's entrepreneurship policies in two African nations.