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The purpose of this paper is to examine how female entrepreneurs navigate complex and challenging institutional environments. It draws on institutional theory and the concept of response strategies to institutional pressures to explore the institutional barriers that female entrepreneurs encounter and highlights the strategies women employ to overcome them.

This paper builds on a case study of female entrepreneurs engaged in food processing in Tanzania. It draws on semi-structured interviews with nine female entrepreneurs, one focus group discussion with six female entrepreneurs and two semi-structured interviews with representatives from women’s business associations (WBAs).

This paper reveals a repertoire of active strategies enacted by women entrepreneurs, including advocacy through WBAs, bootstrapping, semi-informal operations, co-location of home and business, spouse involvement in the business, downplay of gender identity, reliance on persistence and passion and networking through WBAs. While these strategies involve various degrees of agency, the findings indicate that collective efforts through WBAs offer women the most promise in terms of influencing institutional structures.

While there is a growing body of literature examining how institutions influence female entrepreneurs, there is a dearth of knowledge on how women experience institutional complexities and actively react to institutional barriers, complexities and contradictions. This paper shows the value of analytical attention to female entrepreneurs’ agency by highlighting women’s active responses and documenting a repertoire of strategies.

This paper explores the potentiality of export processing zones (EPZs) as a development strategy for Sub‐Saharan African countries using the Mauritian EPZ model as a case study. In the literature positive relationships between export expansion and economic growth and between EPZs and export growth have been found in developing countries. Export‐oriented strategy is particularly important for developing countries given their dependency on foreign countries for most of their key inputs and technologies required in their production. Our findings suggest that EPZs can play a crucial role in the economic and social development of a country. Also that EPZs’ success may be greater if they are implemented as part of an overall trade‐oriented reform programme aimed at opening up the whole country rather than treating them as enclaves. Comprehensive incentives are required. The Mauritian EPZ experience thus provides good lessons to other Sub‐Saharan African countries pursuing economic reforms.