Youth Entrepreneurial Pathways: Gendered Experiences of African Graduates

Formal employment has been shrinking since the 1970s, with work becoming more piecemeal and informal. Youth participation in the labour market, especially on the African continent, is primarily characterised by precarity. Faced with structural barriers to livelihoods, youth are pursuing opportunities outside of formal employment, including entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship entails starting a new business venture and/or expanding an existing one. With the precarity of work expected to continue, partly due to Africa’s youth bulge, it is imperative that youth entrepreneurial pathways be better understood as entrepreneurship has been shown to contribute to innovation, job creation and economic growth. This paper describes the entrepreneurial motivations and journeys of African graduates, with a focus on their gendered experiences. Tracking graduates funded through scholarships and using an integrative mixed methods approach, this paper draws from the findings of a five-year longitudinal cohort study. Quantitative interviews were conducted with 577 graduates in 2020, 2022 and 2024 while 106 graduates participated in qualitative interviews in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2024. Findings showed the gendered nature of entrepreneurial motivations and journeys of African graduates, with a higher proportion of male than female participants having started business ventures and operating businesses with formal registration. While the data indicated the interconnectedness of entrepreneurial drivers, the primary entrepreneurial motivation for both male and female participants was to make money and help people. Furthermore, entrepreneurship was described as an “alternative” to formal employment in contexts of poverty and unemployment. The profitability gap between male and female-owned businesses was concerning with the types of businesses started, particularly in agriculture and the digital economy, favouring males than females due to gender stereotyping. This paper underscores the need to expand the concept of work and for context- and gender-sensitive interventions and continuous support for African graduates in order to ready them for the future.