Challenging Established Structures: Gender and Rural Entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa

Despite an increasing scholarly attention to understand rural entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurial processes in developing countries’ context are largely unexplored. Knowledge about different structures that configures rural entrepreneurial processes is inadequate to fully understand the phenomena from the perspectives of developing countries. More specifically, the knowledge of rurality and the gendered structures, and their influences on rural entrepreneurship, remains mostly assumptive amongst professionals and policymakers. This chapter attempts to fill this knowledge gap by exploring, analysing and discussing the influence of rurality and gendered structures on rural entrepreneurship. We achieve our objectives with the aid of three case studies of rural women entrepreneurs in the agricultural sector within Sub-Saharan African countries’ context, Tanzania in particular.