Women entrepreneurs have significant contributions to the economies of sub-Saharan Africa. However, women in this region are facing a shocking array of challenges in their business environment. This paper examines the challenges facing women entrepreneurs in the food processing industry in Iringa, Tanzania. The study employs interviews and focus group discussions in collecting data and utilizes content analysis for interpreting findings. The findings indicate that these women entrepreneurs face problems of lack of access to markets, unequal social responsibility and lack of enough capital. Our findings also show that women entrepreneurs in the food processing business of the region employ an array of transversal strategies in order tackle and mitigate the socio-cultural challenges, including the creation of economic groups and entrepreneurship clubs. Our work sheds light on the issues that women entrepreneurs in the food processing industry struggle with in Iringa. Furthermore, we present the general and transversal strategies that they use in order to mitigate the problem and finally put forward the use of mobile technology as a transversal tool.

Mobile marketing apps have been progressively employed as business gadget innovations in developing economies. Research has acknowledged a number of encounters between women entrepreneurs and innovation opportunities. One identified opportunity is the application of technology to enable women entrepreneurs' access to market information with ease. This paper reports the cocreation process of a mobile application contextualized to Tanzanian women entrepreneurs to facilitate access to market information for improving their business performance and livelihood. Our study employs design science research (DSR) strategy for the cocreation and codesign of the mobile application artifact. After evaluating in the wild the mobile application, the women entrepreneurs participating in the study reported that through the codesigned mobile phone app access to market information is facilitated, and their business and the networks could be expanded. The contribution of our paper highlights the benefits of employing codesign and cocreation in combination with DSR to achieve a meaningful and contextualized virtual platform for accessing market information and for business networks expansion through direct contact with target consumers.

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 Information and communications technology is a catalyst to the development of socio-economic sectors in Tanzania including the fishing sector. However, despite the contribution made by mobile phone technologies as one of the ICT modern gears in the development of fishing industry, most small-scale fishers are poor, and their working environment is of great risks due to various challenges. This being the case, the current study investigated the extent to which smallscale fishermen use mobile phone technology for enhancing safety and increase of fishery production through the access to reliable market information. The study employed interviews, focus group discussion, documents review, and observation in collecting data. Purposive and snowball sampling techniques were used to obtain 70 respondents from Nyasa District Council which is found in Ruvuma Region, Tanzania. Content analysis technique was employed in data analysis. The findings indicate that although mobile phone technology is used by small-scale fishermen such as marketing of fishery products and sharing information about where to get big cashes, to a great extent, mobile phone technologies do not help them to improve safeties due to various challenges such as poor cell phone network, high costs of purchasing airtime and low quality of mobile handset which in turn hindering an effective communication. It was further observed that drowning, poor knowledge on weather forecast, poor fishing equipment, sexual transmitted diseases, stressful life, and family separation are key challenges that affect the lives of small-scale fishing practitioners in Lake Nyasa. This study contributes knowledge to the already existing literature on the role of mobile phone technology in the development of small-scale fishing sector in Tanzania and it lays down basis for development mobile virtual platform for improving safety and increase fishing productivity of the target users

Women entrepreneurs are key players in the economic development of societies in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, research has reported that business and technology incubators offer insufficient support to their enterprises. Consequently, this paper sets out to explore and highlight the present status of the contribution of business and technology incubators to women entrepreneurs' businesses. The study collected data through exploratory focus group discussions, in-depth interviews, and structured questionnaires. The data were analysed and interpreted using the convergent parallel method. The findings indicate that business incubators provide women's business with training and to some extend enhance their access to market information and business networks. However, the study also finds a lack of contextualisation in the business and technology incubators' services to the real needs of the incubatees, which eventually makes their support less impactful. In this light, the study recommends the provision of incubators' services tailored to the real needs of women businesses. Our work puts forward recommendations to support women entrepreneurs' business development through the contextualisation of the incubators' services tailored to the incubatees' real needs including appropriate training beyond business management. Further investments for establishing new incubation centres are also recommended.