Deconstructing the myth: African women entrepreneurs’ access to resources

Women entrepreneurship in Africa has seen an impressive leap amidst coping with multifaceted challenges at individual, meso and macro levels. Whilst various motives can drive women entrepreneurship in an African context, less is known about the extent to which women entrepreneurs are able to access and use enterprising resources. To address this gap, this chapter conducted the systematic literature review of published articles from the period 1990-2020 in prominent data bases such as ScienceDirect, Web of Science, Google Scholar and ProQuest. The review found that, overall, studies on the women’s access to, and use of, resources have been a very recent phenomenon, have received an extremely limited attention by scholars, theoretically fragmented, methodologically quantitative and were not able to develop cumulative knowledge on this area. The bias towards cause-effect and gender differences’ explanations in view of mainstreaming women entrepreneurship ‘inadvertently’ led to not only to narrow understanding and theoretical underdevelopment of the field but also to “focus on assumed, innate sex differences that perpetuate the gender gaps.