Environmental Consciousness of Entrepreneurs in Ghana: How Do Entrepreneur Types, Demographic Characteristics and Product Competitiveness Count?

Simon Bawakyillenuo,Innocent Sefa Komla Agbelie

doi:10.3390/su13169139

Abstract

Businesses are believed to be partly responsible for upsetting the balance of local biodiversity through activities that degrade the environment. Critically, entrepreneurship is increasingly being cited as a key sector that can bring about sustainable transformation in production and distribution. Ghana’s total entrepreneurial activity rate is estimated at 37%, with businesses operating unsustainably. Meanwhile, little has been explored empirically on the factors that influence businesses’ sensitivity to the environment in Ghana. Using the 2013 GEM data in estimating seven different logic regression models coupled with a qualitative analysis, this paper fills the gap by investigating how the demographic and entrepreneurial characteristics of entrepreneurs in Ghana influence their environmental consciousness. The empirical evidence suggests that education fosters environmental consciousness, while owner-manager and female entrepreneurs as well as rural locality entrepreneurs in Ghana tend to be more environmentally sensitive. The qualitative data also revealed general concerns for the environment as motivating factors for entrepreneurs to be more environmentally conscious. The findings therefore draw attention to the inadequate focus on green entrepreneurship in Ghana. Embarking on educational campaigns to promote the adherence to environmental regulations by all businesses, especially those in urban areas, could help build a robust eco-preneurship landscape in Ghana.

Highlights

Entrepreneurship is increasingly being cited as a key sector that can bring about sustainable transformation in production and distribution processes, once the appropriate enabling factors are in place
Some of the variables were interacted to assess their impacts on environmental consciousness of entrepreneurs in Ghana
A male nascent entrepreneur in the Greater Accra Region pointed out that: “ . . . as I mentioned, things like these environmental issues are things we have considered very well before going into what we want to do . . . Even in our offices, we want to go with less paper, and use more of things that we can do on the machines”

Summary

Introduction

The current trend of society’s consumption of natural resources, especially in the area of energy production, requires a fundamental transformation if the world is to make meaningful progress in curtailing ecosystem degradation and global climate change [1]. A few scholars consider the business community partly responsible for many of these environmental problems [2,3,4,5]. Entrepreneurship is increasingly being cited as a key sector that can bring about sustainable transformation in production and distribution processes, once the appropriate enabling factors are in place. Academic discourse on sustainable development within the mainstream entrepreneurship literature has gained recognition over time, with many studies exploring various channels through which environmental consciousness can be nurtured among entrepreneurs

Methods

Results

Conclusion