Abstract
Subsistence women in developing economies are largely marginalised yet their circumstances could be improved through entrepreneurship. The study sought to establish the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation on entrepreneurial intention and the moderating and direct effects of demographic profiles as an oasis of establishing a predictive model on prospective rural women entrepreneurs. Data were collected from prospective women entrepreneurs in the rural markets of Manicaland Province, Zimbabwe. A sample of 192 women was used. Data analysis was done using structural equation modeling to address the research hypotheses. Convenience sampling was applied to test the hypotheses relying on consenting women.The adequacy of the sample was tested using Kaiser-mayor-olkin and also the Bartlett’s test for sphericity. Initially, exploratory factor analysis was done using Principal Component Analysis. The rotated component matrix was also extracted. Data analysis was performed using Smartpls program. The results of analysing data show a significant relationship between innovativeness and risk-taking ability on entrepreneurial intention. However, data analysed did not confirm the hypothesised relationships between proactiveness and demographic profiles on entrepreneurial intention. It is recommended that entrepreneurship financiers, Non-Governmental Organisations and Governments should consider rural women’s innovativeness and risk-taking ability in screening potential entrepreneurs for funding and training.
Highlights
The poor outnumber the rich in terms of population because “the bottom of the pyramid” had 3.5 billion people in 2017 (GlobalWealthReport-CreditSuisse, 2019; Prahalad & Hart, 2002)
The findings of this study are in tandem with the argument by Cheng et al (2009) together with Ndubisi and Iftikhar (2012) who discovered that innovativeness is a key success factor of every entrepreneurial activity
The results suggested that innovativeness and risk-taking as pointers to identify prospective women’s entre preneurial intention were found to be the most appropriate
Summary
The poor outnumber the rich in terms of population because “the bottom of the pyramid” had 3.5 billion people in 2017 (GlobalWealthReport-CreditSuisse, 2019; Prahalad & Hart, 2002) The majority of these poor people are in rural areas (subsistence marketplaces) especially in Africa where 56% live in rural areas (Worldometer, 2020). Women in subsistence marketplaces live at the intersection of poverty, illiteracy and marketplace (Viswanathan, 2017) and they have not attracted researchers’ interest at microlevel to understand their entrepreneurial intentions. It is expected that a woman should contribute to the economy and that is why more donor funds and government projects are directed towards women It is a big loss for the country not to benefit from the women given that they are more than 50% of the population in most African countries (Worldbank, 2020). The vast benefits from entrepreneurial activities have led many nations to spearhead for a larger scale establishment of start-ups and new ventures (GEM, 2019)
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