Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight the role of female immigrant entrepreneurs generally and more specifically Nigerian women entrepreneurs in Ghana, West Africa. Design/methodology/approach This is a qualitative research that draws on a broad-based research on Nigerian men and women immigrants’ entrepreneurship in Ghana. Face-to-face interviews with six women in the study are analysed here to provide insights into their motivations for and embeddedness of their entrepreneurship activities in Ghana. Findings The women’s entrepreneurship activities lend themselves to the mixed embeddedness argument in two ways: first is their ethnic embeddedness, and second their embeddedness in informality and policy framework. Also, all the women work in very trying circumstances and thus display what can be described as a “daring entrepreneurship” drive. Practical implications This paper is positioned at the intersection of ethnic embeddedness, informality and daring entrepreneurial drive by migrant women. Originality/value The paper provides an unprecedented and a refreshing account on the entrepreneurship and operational pathways of women in the margin of the global economy.

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The mobility/immobility research frontier in migration scholarship has gained ascendancy since the beginning of this century with some studies highlighting the need for broader global trends in cross-border mobility/immobility research. This article on Nigerian immigrants as ‘liminars’in Ghana, West Africa, is an attempt to join the global cross-border mobility/immobility discourse on mobile people. It is anchored in the qualitative research tradition with the empirical data generated through in-depth interviews, observations and market conversations with 41 Nigerian immigrant entrepreneurs in Accra (the capital of Ghana), Kumasi (the second largest city after Accra) and Ashaiman (a sprawling sub-urban settlement). In a three-theme analysis approach, the paper shows three intersections in mobilities, immobilities and borderland accounts, namely mobility/borderland, trapped/living in a borderland space, and immobility in temporal-spatial borderland, and places the immigrants into a liminar category. This article is a contribution to understanding the mobility/immobility research frontier from the perspective of the global south and its impact on global southern ‘citizens’.

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