Contextualizing entrepreneurship for Africa's post-Covid-19 recovery and growth

Abstract

Entrepreneurship plays an important role in employment, income generation, food security, empowerment, job creation, and productivity growth in Africa. However, many businesses in Africa are heavily dependent on foreign direct investment and channels both for inputs and markets and lack economic resilience and diversification. Consequently, the complete lockdown and frontier closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a deteriorating impact on its formal and informal economic activities. The purpose of the paper is therefore to examine the challenges and responses of the African economy to COVID-19 and if the contextualized entrepreneurship approach is important in the post-COVID recovery and growth in Africa. The paper used secondary data collected through a systematic and contextual review of the latest publications and reports. The findings show that Africa is challenged with a lack of managerial skills, infrastructure, capital markets, access to finance, and incentives for entrepreneurship. Moreover, a realistic, contextualized, and sustainable trajectory recovery and development plan is critical to tackle the scale and depth of the COVID-19 challenges in Africa. In this regard, this paper provides important recommendations for African-oriented entrepreneurship development pathways and policies. This will have important implications for the post-COVID-19 recovery and the growth of entrepreneurship in Africa.

Keywords

• Entrepreneurship
• Covid-19
• Contextualizing
• Academics
• Africa
• Recovery