Delivering Meaningful Poverty Alleviation Experiences: The Role of Successful Ghanaian Indigenous Women Entrepreneurs

This chapter explores successful Ghanaian indigenous entrepreneurship support for poverty alleviation. The existing literature views indigenous women's entrepreneurship as a solution to poverty and discusses how successful indigenous women's entrepreneurship empowers the poor to address health, education, and standard of living. Despite the contributions of these women, the theoretical underpinning of indigenous women's entrepreneurship is Western-centric and is challenged in providing insights on how indigenous women's entrepreneurship works in developing economies such as Ghana. The authors extend this field of study by examining how Ghanaian indigenous women entrepreneurs define success and the impact of their successful entrepreneurial activities on poverty alleviation. The study highlights the understanding of indigenous women's entrepreneurship success based on the triple bottom-line framework. Financial, economic, and social capital were resources provided by these women to address the health, education, and standard of living challenges of the poor on individual and community levels. We also elaborate on the theoretical, practical, and policy implications of the findings for the development of an inconclusive understanding of indigenous entrepreneurship's definition of success which is embedded in both local and Western principles and thereby contributes to the underexplored emerging field of indigenous women entrepreneurship in developing economies.