In this exclusive Q&A, Professor Robert Nason delves into his groundbreaking research on informal entrepreneurship in Africa. With a focus on the unique economic activities within the townships of Cape Town, South Africa, and the evolving role of Market Queens in Ghana's Ketjetia Marketplace, Professor Nason's work challenges conventional views on entrepreneurship. Collaborating with global researchers and local organizations like the Sustainable Livelihood Foundation, he sheds light on the often overlooked yet vibrant entrepreneurial landscape in Africa.
Please tell us briefly about the nature of your research work in Africa
My research generally focuses on understanding how informal institutions shape entrepreneurial activity in Africa. My primary research site has been in the Townships of Cape Town, South Africa where we try to understand the unique nature of the largely informal economic activity that takes place there. I’m working with a team of researchers from around the world and we are collaborating with a local non-profit organization, the , which does amazing work documenting the largely invisible economic activity in the townships and co-creating solutions to challenges faced by local entrepreneurs.
I am also working on another project, lead by co-author Arielle Newman at Syracuse which examines the evolving influence of Market Queens in the Ketjetia Marketplace in Ghana.
What do you find most exciting about this collaboration?
I think it is exciting to understand a very different type of entrepreneurial activity than we typically think about or teach. While Silicon Valley style entrepreneurs dominate public discourse around entrepreneurship, it is important to recognize that entrepreneurship comes in many flavors –dentists, doctors, artists, activists, taxi drivers, and informal street traders. Moreover, it is true that most of the rich are entrepreneurs (75% of the top 1% wealthiest own and actively manage a private enterprise), but the reality is that most entrepreneurs are poor. If we really want to understand the phenomenon of entrepreneurship we need to more intentionally explore its most common manifestation. I’m motivated to bring this more into mainstream research conversations and understand topics like township entrepreneurship on its own terms – what does innovation look like in the townships, what challenges are entrepreneurs facing, what is important to township entrepreneurs, what factors are influencing their strategic decision making? When we do this, it challenges many of the dominant assumptions around strategy and entrepreneurship in existing literature (which is largely based on studying a narrow set of Western firms).
What have you learned from your data about the topic you are researching?
Our most recent looked at the topic of venture visibility. In Western entrepreneurship research and teaching, we tend to think that the more visible the firm the better. Struggling startups try to make themselves look more successful than they actually are. But in the townships there are real risks to being visible and especially visibly successful. You may become a target for police raids, criminal robbery, or expropriation from gangs. We studied this issue and developed the idea of selective visibility from our data. The idea is that entrepreneurs try to make themselves visible to stakeholders who may help their business while simultaneously concealing themselves from stakeholders who may hurt the business. This insight has really important implications because it suggests that imposing a Western approach to venture visibility in a context like the townships, for instance through entrepreneurship training programs, is problematic because it may actually be dangerous for local entrepreneurs. I think it is illustrative of the more reflective and critical approach to existing assumptions that we need to take when designing entrepreneurship and economic development initiatives in Africa.
The other is that the factors that shape entrepreneurial activity are often very different than what we are used to in Canada or North America. A lot of existing work has defined places like Africa by what they lack (e.g. called them institutional voids) because there may not be well developed capital markets or legal infrastructure, but there is tremendous richness in institutional fabric – whether it being family, community, tribal heritage, or religious traditions – and these factors are critical to understand and appreciate the distinctive nature of entrepreneurial activity in Africa. We call this taking a presence-based rather than an absence based approach to research in contexts like Africa which have been historically underrepresented in our field.
Are there ways for students or alumni to get involved with your work?
I’ve definitely involved 91ÉçÇø students in this work (several IMSF fellows and PhD students), but I’m not sure that I have a quick and easy way to engage new students. But I’d love to hear from students and alumni who are interested in and active in this space. I could learn a lot from what they are doing I’m sure!
