ABSTRACT
Female entrepreneurship continues to contend with numerous and peculiar obstacles that limit its ability to yield widespread personal and societal transformation and the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals. Literature gives an account of a plethora of challenges confronting female entrepreneurship worldwide and in Africa without critical attention to the actors who promulgate the problems, their power, legitimacy and urgency of their actions/claims. The entrepreneurs and policy makers require these fundamental imperatives to adequately strategise in their quest to address the challenges. It is upon this premise that this research seeks to initiate discussions on the place of stakeholder salience in addressing the drawbacks to female entrepreneurship in Africa. We situate this objective within the transformative research paradigm and employ a qualitative research approach to conduct a systematic literature review of the challenges of female entrepreneurship in Africa and to proffer a typology of stakeholder salience. Informed by inclusion/exclusion criteria, we reviewed 72 publications published between 2002 and 2022. Thematic content analysis of the publications, based on institutions and resource acquisition within the entrepreneurship eco-system backed by a stakeholder salience framework, revealed generic institutional constraints that are common to female entrepreneurs in all the countries involved in the study; and some country-specific institutional constraints. In addition, female entrepreneurs grapple with resource constraints such as limited access to finance, poor market conditions, and personal challenges. Through the interplay of the three stakeholder salience attributes of power, legitimacy and urgency, we proffer five types of stakeholders in the female entrepreneurship landscape of Africa. They are critical stakeholders, derailers, manageable stakeholders, primary supportive stakeholders and secondary supportive stakeholders which require continuous examination and the implementation of appropriate management strategies to effectively address challenges to female entrepreneurship on the continent.
