Hakuna Matata or When Cultures Collide: Navigating Institutional Abundance in Rural Africa

Abstract

In this paper, we examine why and how social enterprises may fail in foreign developing contexts despite promising conditions and initial success. Using data on Villages for Africa (VFA), a social enterprise that provided ‘macro-credits’ to groups of villages and helped them establish their own village enterprises in rural Tanzania, we explore how the organization failed when – counterintuitively – starting to realize its mission to ‘help villagers help themselves.’ By strategically fostering emotional investment of rural communities into their newly-established village enterprises, villagers’ institutional ‘void’ effectively ‘swallowed’ VFA’s macro-credit model as rural community members started to adapt the intervention in accordance with their context’s normative demands. The increased sense of cultural ownership that villagers displayed for VFA’s development intervention led to a normative collision of cultures and forced VFA to abandon its operations in the region. Among other aspects, our findings suggest the re-conceptualization of institutional voids not as the absence, but the presence of culturally embedded, densely packed institutional arrangements that particularly foreign organizations have to learn to navigate in order to survive.