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This Guest Editorial provides contextual insight to the contributions in this special issue that addresses entrepreneurship and economic growth challenge confronting Africa. Although the contributors come from various academic disciplines and adopt different perspectives, they are united in their singularity of focus on entrepreneurship as a pathway for African future. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The papers in this special issue adopt different methodological approaches that help to provide a composite insight to the multidimensional entrepreneurial challenges facing Africa. They review published materials from the government sources and international agencies. They draw heavily on the literature in the field of entrepreneurship.

African countries have made significant progress in stimulating economic growth in recent years. However, they still have a long way to go in terms of institutionalizing entrepreneurial paradigm to foster self-regenerating development. Africa needs to do more by leveraging public policy for entrepreneurial development as a pathway for expanding economic opportunities and alleviating poverty. A policy framework designed to anchor entrepreneurial culture in the economy is a key to African economic renaissance in the twenty-first century.

The originality and value of the papers in this issue hinge critically on the all too often ignored proposition that African countries need to embrace a proven approach to development that is both broad based and citizen driven. Entrepreneurial paradigm will empower citizens to take not only full responsibility, but more importantly inalienable ownership, of the development process. This is the only way to ensure that the ongoing much celebrated growth in Africa is sustainable.

The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance to African governments by delineating a framework that would help them to formulate policies that have the potential to engender opportunity entrepreneurship. This framework is used to critique existing entrepreneurship policy in Nigeria. Entrepreneurship policy should stimulate economic growth as a necessary condition for employment generation and poverty alleviation.

The paper adopts evaluative methodology. Data and information used in this paper were obtained from several secondary sources. These included literature review related to the subject area addressed; the Central Bank of Nigeria, which has designed and funded various initiatives to enable SMEs access funding for their businesses; the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics which has conducted surveys of SMEs in the country; and the Small and Medium Enterprise Development Agency of Nigeria, which was established to help promote and develop the SME sub-sector.

The critical findings of the paper are that opportunity entrepreneurship has a better prospect of promoting growth, creating jobs and alleviating poverty than a generic MSME policy being current currently promoted. Targeted entrepreneurship policy to incentivize opportunity-oriented entrepreneurs would produce greater benefit to the economy and society. Such entrepreneurship policy should aim at motivating and facilitating the transitions of necessity entrepreneurs to opportunity entrepreneurship and microenterprises to small and medium enterprises. More importantly, entrepreneurship policy should be targeted at drastically shrinking the informal sector to the barest minimum, while helping to aggressively expand the formal sector, spur innovations, foster growth, expand opportunities and create jobs.

The implication of this paper is the desperate need to refocus public policy on a high-impact entrepreneurship. This calls for a rethinking of existing policy and programs to address their inherent shortcomings.

Existing micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) policy has not achieved the twin goals of job creation and poverty alleviation. This paper contributes to the existing body of work by providing a framework for informed decision-making relative to entrepreneurship policy that has the potential to achieve macroeconomic goals of job creation and poverty alleviation. The framework directs the attention of policymakers to opportunity entrepreneurship as a necessary focus of public policy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of public policies on engendering entrepreneurship and micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSME) development in Nigeria. Gaps in policies and factors that impede entrepreneurship and MSME development are identified and proposals are offered to address the impediments.

A thorough review of the mainstream literature on entrepreneurship and MSME development is undertaken. This constitutes the reference point for identifying and reviewing specific public policies formulated and programs designed to stimulate entrepreneurial activities and facilitate MSME development. Data were obtained from federal government agencies. This paper contends that for public policies to accomplish their designed objectives of engendering entrepreneurship and MSME development, strategic realignments of various policy dimensions and programs are imperative.

Misalignments occur when existing public policies in other domains are in conflict with policies to promote entrepreneurship and MSME development. Policy misalignments negate the profit motive of entrepreneurship; stifle business innovation and expansion; and contribute to survivalist mode of entrepreneurship in the country. This thwarts the public policy goals of creating jobs and alleviating poverty.

Government needs to streamline current regulatory requirements and revamp tax policies to encourage entrepreneurs and MSMEs. Improvements in infrastructure (road networks, highways, power supply, and telecommunications) will significantly reduce overhead costs for entrepreneurs and help MSMEs to grow.

The paper demonstrates that without strategic realignments of public policies to ensure consistency and coherency in various dimensions, efforts to promote entrepreneurship and MSME development will not yield positive results. Existing public policies and programs need to be brought into tight realignment with policies and regulations in other domains to galvanize entrepreneurial efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a classificatory framework for mapping out entrepreneurs and small businesses with growth potentials in Africa.

The study undertakes a review of the existing development economics and entrepreneurship literature to determine the need for the framework and how to proceed in developing it.

The literature review informs that although enterprise-led growth provides a greater promise for absolute poverty reduction, policymakers lack guidelines on how to identify those with highest potentials for job creation and tax revenue generation. Furthermore, African entrepreneurs can purposefully be classified in terms of their motives and degree of innovation. The classification produces a 2×2 matrix that maps out the growth capabilities of businesses found in a given country or community.

The framework provides researchers and policymakers with descriptive categories that can guide their strategies and decisions.

Introducing innovation-imitation dimension into the classificatory framework extends and improves previous typologies of small enterprises available in the literature.

Entrepreneurship ecosystems could be useful road maps for the formulation of entrepreneurship policies for countries in Africa. The twenty-first century economic development agenda lay a lot of emphasis on the pivotal role that entrepreneurship plays in the growth of economies, job creation and poverty alleviation especially in Africa. But without the right entrepreneurial ecosystems to enhance the formulation of pertinent entrepreneurship policies, achieving entrepreneurial economic growth will be difficult. The existing frameworks for the development of entrepreneurship ecosystems are based on research that has been conducted elsewhere. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Entrepreneurship research in Africa has rarely focused in understanding and evaluating the entrepreneurship ecosystems. In this paper, we have attempted to examine the present state of the entrepreneurship ecosystems in four countries (Botswana, Egypt, Ghana and Uganda) in Africa. Despite the fact that extant literature on the concept is limited, it has been reviewed to provide a picture of entrepreneurship ecosystems. Relevant national and international documents were also examined to evaluate the present state of entrepreneurship ecosystems in these countries.

The findings from each of the countries though they depict a static situation, justify the proposition that entrepreneurs are omnipresent, it is only the entrepreneurship environment that accounts for the differences in entrepreneurial economic growth and the cross-countries comparisons shows the dissimilarities in national entrepreneurship environments.

In conclusion, a broad process to develop entrepreneurship ecosystems initiatives is suggested alongside the crucial roles that governments and other stakeholders should play which implies that a National Entrepreneurship Mission might be necessary.

Multiple case studies that have compared entrepreneurship ecosystems of countries in Africa are very rare. This study though explorative, is one of the first. The findings and conclusions could be useful for a detailed study to map out pertinent and self sustaining entrepreneurship ecosystems that are necessary for the formulation of entrepreneurship policies.

The economic impact of scientific research is receiving widespread attention all over the world, with interest being paid to research results that could potentially contribute to economic growth. There have been various policy responses in many African countries to facilitate the nation’s transition from a production-based to an innovation-based economy, especially in the universities. The effort is, however taken for granted that scientists (researchers) are now having academic entrepreneurship mindset. The purpose of this paper is to attempt at developing a model that integrates individual, organisational and institutional determinants of academic entrepreneurship, which can facilitate the ability to cross the “valley of death”.

The paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature to establish the factors that influence the capacity of academic researchers to discover and exploit opportunities for converting knowledge into commercialisable products.

The findings indicate that exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities is driven by the extent of previous collaboration with industry, cognitive integration and prior entrepreneurial experience. Moreover, the university institutional environment must encourage and facilitate the creation of university spin-offs.

The paper and the proposed framework are based on theoretical suppositions related to the determinant factors underlying the formation of academic entrepreneurial intentions. Therefore, an empirical analysis is required to measure each factor proposed in this model.

Considering the present weak national innovation system and university-industry linkages, universities in developing countries will require more than the production of potentially useful knowledge. There is need for conscious efforts by the university administration to put in place mechanisms that will facilitate the commercialisation of knowledge being produced in the university, encourage active participation in designing marketable products, as well as playing a leadership role in ensuring successful commercialisation.

The findings and framework developed in this paper can serve as an input to the design of policies that can stimulate the entrepreneurial activity of the academic researchers so that they can further contribute to technological development and economic growth in African countries.

Majority of the empirical studies on entrepreneurship in developing countries have not attempted to understand the entrepreneurial intention of university academic (researchers). But the current efforts of integrating economic development as an additional function to research and teaching of the universities in developing countries requires that they should operate more entrepreneurially. Therefore, this paper is proposing a framework that might stimulate the creation and development of entrepreneurial university thereby making the university to effectively fulfil its teaching, research and entrepreneurial missions.

Although there is great deal of research on export assistance programmes in developed countries, studies on developing countries in Africa has received scant attention in the literature. Lack of detailed information in many developing African countries makes it difficult to assess the effect of export promotion programmes (EPPs) on the firm’s export performance in foreign markets. The purpose of this paper is to explore entrepreneurial development in the value-added export sector of Ghana and screen EPPs provided by public policy makers to examine the impact of these programmes on export performance of Ghanaian firms in foreign markets.

A conceptual/exploratory paper is developed with discussion.

The paper suggests that the ability of exporters to enhance their performance is driven by the usage of outside market access, export development/training and information related export assistance programmes offered by public policy makers. Utilisation of EPPs builds experiential knowledge which serves as a source of competitive advantage for exporters to implement effective marketing mix strategies to enhance performance.

The study underscores the specific EPPs export managers can utilise to enhance performance and improve their international marketing strategy in foreign markets. Public policy makers need to work together with exporters to incorporate and develop programmes to suit the idiosyncrasies of foreign markets and boost the growth of value-added exports.

The study explores past literature to screen and evaluate the effect of EPPs and entrepreneurial development to boost export growth in Ghana – Sub-Sahara Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate how women entrepreneurs in Tanzania assess their accessibility to different external financial sources. The aim is further to discuss financial preferences among this group of entrepreneurs.

The study is based on a unique database consisting of 114 firms, obtained by a questionnaire during 2009-2010. Differences between mean values on perceptions of financial sources were tested via a paired samples t-test.

Overall, the empirical results provide support for the hypothesis that the sampled women entrepreneurs perceive semi-formal capital, such as loans from MFIs, SACCOS, ROSCAS and VICOBA, as the most accessible external capital. Governmental subsidies are ranked second, followed by informal capital, such as loans from family, friends and investors. As expected, loans from formal banks are ranked as the least accessible financing alternative. However, there are strong indications that the entrepreneurs in our study, if given a choice, would prefer external capital from formal sources, rather than semi-formal or informal capital.

The authors suggest that the formal banks work to find ways to lower agency costs and thereby work for an inclusion of women entrepreneurs, and for the semi-formal financial actors to improve financial services in ways that better serve the entrepreneurs.

The knowledge about attitudes and preferences concerning financial solutions among women entrepreneurs in developing countries is very limited. Results from this study is therefore important, as it adds to previous understanding, especially as this particular group of entrepreneurs have the potential to play an important role in the development of their regions.

The purpose of this paper is to supplement the literature on the effect of female entrepreneurship on economic growth by bringing new evidence for the case of SMEs owned by women in Cameroon.

Effects of female entrepreneurship on Cameroonian economic growth are analyzed through a simple statistical analysis.

Our results reveal that there is a growing female entrepreneurship in Cameroon, localized in many different sectors of activity. Moreover, these SMEs are opportunity entrepreneurship which contributes to economic growth by considerably reducing unemployment particularly for women, generating revenues for government and enhancing human capital skills.

The study suggests an investment in SMEs owned by women and an investment in education and skills of those women in order to positively affect economic growth.

Many studies have focussed their attention on the relationship between SMEs and economic growth, but few attempted to evaluate the theoretical assumptions in case studies and in a gender perspective.