Female Immigrant Entrepreneurs from Developing and Developed Countries: Multi-level Approach Paving a Path to Being a Successful Entrepreneur in Germany

Despite increasing numbers of female immigrant entrepreneurs, their existence, needs and contributions have long been overlooked in their host society. Among many reasons for such disinclination are gender-biased assumptions and ethnic background-based constraints. Considering these impediments, this paper aims to focus on experiences of female immigrant entrepreneurs in Germany and in doing so, evaluate the factors involved in the whole process of enabling immigrant women to become entrepreneurs using a qualitative multi-level approach including micro, meso and macro levels. Given the objectives, an exploratory research design has been chosen in which one-to-one in-depth interviews using the standardised open-ended interview form have been conducted to collect unique experiences of female immigrant entrepreneurs from different ethnic backgrounds. As a result, our study became a pilot study. This research intends to derive practice-oriented recommendations for reducing obstacles to fill the gap between the formed policies and their implementation on a multi-level basis. These recommendations would help increase the efficacy of the process for integrating future female immigrants of all ethnic groups into entrepreneurial activities in the host society and successfully pave the way for them to become entrepreneurs. This chapter meets an identified need to examine the situation of female immigrant entrepreneurs from different ethnicities in Germany from multi-level perspectives. Our findings contribute to policy recommendations that could foster female immigrant entrepreneurship in general.