It’s time for Africa: Opportunities and Challenges for Social Entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Identifying and choosing the right opportunity are one of the most important ability of a suc-cessful company. An opportunity could be identified in different ways and influenced by sev-eral factors. Since the creation of a successful business often relies on a successful opportuni-ty development process, there is a need for a deeper understanding on how the opportunity identification will affect the continued operations of a company. Since many Western mar-kets are being saturated emerging markets provide many potential business opportunities. In addition, social entrepreneurship, a combination of economic and social value creation is gaining importance. The African continent is characterised by several social issues, which has the potential of becoming opportunities for social entrepreneurs. The purpose of the thesis is to fill a research gap concerning how the opportunity identification will affect the continued operations of a company and particularly the challenges encountered. To address the research gaps, the authors formed the research question: How does the opportunity identification affect the challenges of an establishment for a social enterprise in a Sub-Saharan African market? A multiple case study was conducted of six social entrepreneurs in four different Sub-Saharan markets. This has resulted in two major findings. The first finding indicates that dif-ferences in how an opportunity is identified do not directly affect the challenges encountered by social entrepreneurs establishing in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the second finding in-dicates that the use of a network in the opportunity development could mitigate some of the challenges encountered by the companies.