Exploring potential climate-related entrepreneurship opportunities and challenges for rural Nigerian women

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is a tool for facilitating rural economic development, which is becoming increasingly needed to respond to the growing impacts of accelerating climate change on rural women's livelihoods in less developed countries creating constraints on sustainable development. This study examines the awareness of and impacts of climatic changes as perceived by women in South West Nigeria in diverse vegetation zones. It elicits the challenges facing women and which constrain their entrepreneurial activities. It therefore identifies potential adaptation strategies and opportunities, including drawing on a review of wider developments in at international development level, such as technological, institutional and infrastructural innovations. The study employed explorative, mixed approaches, including quantitative and qualitative methods. Five hundred and ninety-five questionnaires were administered to selected respondents through multi-stage sampling technique, while Focused Group Discussions (FGDs) were used to solicit qualitative data from two hundred and forty women. Quantitative data were analysed with SPSS for descriptive and analysis of variance, and Atlas ti. was used to thematically analyse qualitative data. Findings showed that women have high levels of awareness of changes in their climate. Analysis of variance revealed that most of the women involved in crop farming in the vegetation zones showed better understanding than women in other livelihood. They strongly agreed (with mean of approximately 5) that climate change had greatly affected soil fertility, caused less predictable, and prolonged the dry season. Over 90% of the women perceived significant impacts of these changes on their livelihood activities. Overall, there were no clear divergences in women's attitudes towards innovation and entrepreneurship between the vegetation zones and a relatively high expectation of government support. Wider review of current practice and innovations highlights a wide range of new opportunities for building women's adaptive capacity which could directly or indirectly catalyse increased entrepreneurship amongst women. Furthermore, the involvement of local authorities and community-based organisations, as well as diverse public and private actors, in the development of adaptation strategies is crucial to achieving this.

Migration and Climate Change Impacts on Rural Entrepreneurs in Nigeria: A Gender Perspective

“…As a result, these zones are suffering from increasing water stress. This agrees with previous studies [46,47]. Consequently, the changes in rainfall and temperature are impacting their growing seasons, planting, and harvesting calendars, thereby leading to crop failure and loss of livestock.…”

“…These findings are highly pertinent because most livelihood sources in the rural areas, such as agriculture, fisheries, and forestry, are climate-sensitive. This corroborates the results of studies such as those of Akinbami et al [46] and Nattapon and Dusadee [29], which showed that natural resources and rural environments are already under pressure resulting from climate change impacts.…”

Institutional entrepreneurship and permaculture: A practice theory perspective

“…Contributions are concerned typically with social enterprise and entrepreneurship, as distinct from ecological sustainable entrepreneurship. There is a subset of research for which the focus of inquiry is indigenous entrepreneurship (Maritz & Foley, 2018; Mika, Fahey, & Bensemann, 2009); another cluster is concerned with women entrepreneurs and gender in entrepreneurship (Akinbami, Olawoye, Adesina, & Nelson, 2019; Micelotta, Washington, & Docekalova, 2018; Qiu, 2018), and a third subset is concerned with social movements and systems or industry change (Carberry, Bharati, Levy, & Chaudhury, 2019; Reinecke, Manning, & von Hagen, 2012). In addition to these, there are individual contributions on diverse topics such as immigrants' entrepreneurship (Yeasmin & Koivurova, 2019), technology entrepreneurship (Hall, Matos, & Bachor, 2019) and policy entrepreneurship undertaken in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (Mintrom & Thomas, 2018).…”

Climatepreneurship: Adaptation Strategy for Climate Change Impacts on Rural Women Entrepreneurship Development in Nigeria

“…4. According to Akinbami et al (2019) and Slater et al (2007), these negative impacts have implications on food security of the nation. As a nation, researchers, civil society, and policy makers should be in quest for innovative approaches to food security and not depleting the available quantity, especially with population increase which may expose people to the risk of hunger and its associated social vices.…”

“…In Nigeria, Nwokeoma et al (2017), Ikehi et al (2014), Akinbami et al (2015Akinbami et al ( , 2019, and Ali (2011), have reported on the effects and social consequences of climate change on the farming families, livelihood practices, farmlands, economic activities, food security, health, and physical infrastructure in various communities in the country. These studies reveal that global warming which is as a result of climate change has serious impacts on the communities and their livelihood practices, and these effects will spiral out of control, if the current trend of increasing greenhouse gas emissions is not curbed.…”