Across the global we continuingly hear financial commentators and academics highlighting the importance of SMEs and the role they play in various countries in employment, engines of economic growth, social development and how they account for large percentages of GDP and as such how the countries prospects for prosperity and the development of healthy market economies rest on them.

In addition, whilst access to finance is high on everyone’s list when people talk about the challenges for SMEs, which restrict their ability to develop and flourish, we must ask if it is the only aspect holding back the development of sustainable enterprises – because if it was then surely it is a simple fix (Read more…).

Until recently, relatively limited worldwide empirical evidence was available to answer the above questions. Many earlier studies relied on data from formally registered firms, leaving the informal economy, which in many countries is the largest contributor to employment, out of the picture. There has been growing recognition of the role, in particular, of self-employment and micro-enterprises in driving employment, yet the evidence base is still not well developed.

Drawing on a new ILO database, ILO’s 2019 « Small Matters » report provides an up-to-date and realistic assessment of the contribution of self-employment and micro- and small enterprises (hereafter referred to as “small economic units”) to employment – both in the formal and the informal economy – across the globe.

A key finding is that, globally, the self-employed and micro- and small enterprises (hereafter referred to as “small economic units”) account for 70 per cent of total employment.

The estimates presented in the report are based on a new ILO database that draws on national household and labour force surveys (as opposed to firm-based surveys) from 99 countries in all the world regions except for North America. Because these surveys target people rather than firms, they are able to cover self-employment and employment in all types of enterprises:

• Enterprises from all size classes: micro-enterprises (with 2 to 9 employees), small enterprises (with 10 to 49 employees) and medium-sized/large enterprises (with 50 or more employees)[1];
• Enterprises from the informal as well as the formal sector;
• Enterprises from agriculture, industry and services (including public services).(Read more…).

Continuing my conversations around the subject of humane entrepreneurship, the purpose of this article is to highlight the story of Heaven Restaurant & Bar, Kigali, Rwanda, owned and managed by an American woman who has been doing business in a foreign country since 2006. The case study was developed over a 6-month period in the second half of 2012 and framed around a qualitative analysis and an in-depth interview with the owner/funder. 

The narrative unpacks the coping strategies and realities of an ethnic minority business through insider accounts of its founder and her commitment to giving back by improving hospitality and supporting tourism development in her host country, Rwanda (Read more…).

The first months of 2020 have brought us an incredible sense of clarity in regards to our personal, communal, and global lives. We are all individuals who, consciously and unconsciously, exist in multiple markets throughout the world. The experiences that compile from our multiplicity of existence are then used to divide us into specific categories, based on comprehensive similarities amongst different groups. Time is often used as one of these categories of similar differences in the way that it striates generations from one another. Common differences between youth, women, minorities seem to shape the economic systems of the world. Interestingly enough, it is, however, “the trajectory of the overall employment effects [that are] driven by young workers” (Rinz 2019). The most captivating generation, given their great generational differences with their predecessors, seems to be those born between 1977 and 1998, often referred to as the Millennial Generation. Millennials are “often distinctively described by their particular fashion of existing within society” (Tapscott 1998). Their defining trends show up most clearly throughout their interactions, or lack thereof, within the workforce (Read more…).

In my 2013 study on “Sex in the kitchen: changing gender roles in a female-dominated occupation,” I sought to provide a gender entrepreneurship slant to the revolving landscape in the ‘culinary underbelly’– i.e. chef life and cooking in general. The conceptual study was primarily geared towards extending the boundaries of the identified female-dominated occupations beyond the usual suspects – social work, nursing, elementary school teacher – to the kitchen, as the identity of chef life is unpacked. While the study arguably heeds the call to explore occupational segregation in the light of gender and ethnicity, its main emphasis was on building upon prior studies on occupational sex-segregation rather than the ethnicity dimension. Looking back on that study, I still refrain from exploring ethnicity, but gender and perhaps nationality, speak volumes on the need for “humane entrepreneurship.” (Read more…).