Recognising Opportunities for Social Entrepreneurship in Africa

Building on the work by Patzelt and Shepherd (2010) the paper explores the recognition of opportunities for social entrepreneurship in Africa. In particular, it acknowledges what is proposed in their article and gives two contributions to the model development: first it expands the boundaries of the model by integrating additional variables, namely embeddedness in the context and innovativeness; secondly, it also considers the first-person opportunity beliefs. The study is based on both theoretical development and in-depth interviews with 38 students attending and MBA in Social Entrepreneurship at the Tangaza College in Nairobi (Kenya), selected on the basis of a business proposal to be developed over the programme. The importance of small enterprises in developing countries has been underlined by a variety of previous works (Van Dijk 2000). However, evidence on how they originate and relate to the social needs is still limited. Therefore the present study represents an original contribution within extant literature and it is also the first one which proposes an empirical analysis.