Women's entrepreneurship development has recently gained momentum and consideration from academics, policy makers, and practitioners due to the fact that women are considered a power driver for economic growth and development as well as eradication of poverty. This has been reiterated by the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Goal 5, “Achieve Gender Equality and Empower All Women and Girls,” aiming at ending discrimination and violence against women by ensuring equal rights and access to decision-making in political, economic, and public lives. This research utilised a theoretical approach of systematic literature review method to analyse entrepreneurship in general and more specifically on women entrepreneurship, the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on women entrepreneurship globally, challenges confronting women entrepreneurs and providing relevant recommendations to strengthen women entrepreneurs' stance in the community and whole society.
TopMethodology And Research Question
This research utilised the “systematic literature review” method (Crossan & Apaydin, 2010; David & Han, 2004; Newbert, 2007), which differs from the traditional narrative reviews (Cooper, 1998) by being more explicit in the selection of the studies, by employing rigorous and reproducible methods of evaluation and by “assisting in linking future research to the questions and concerns that have been posed by past research” (Thorpe et al., 2005, p.258). Meta-synthesis technique was utilized by integrating, evaluating and interpreting findings from multiple research studies.
This methodology was chosen to enable the researcher from answer the following research question:
“What is the impact of COVID19 pandemic on women entrepreneurship?”
Study Limitations
For this study, the time frame of literature chosen was restricted to recent research to be relevant to the research question under investigation i.e. “What is the impact of COVID19 pandemic on women entrepreneurship?”. The researcher utilised Google Scholar searching engine for information by selecting research conducted between the years 2000 to 2021 to obtain the latest information on the topic under investigation.
What Is Entrepreneaurship?
Entrepreneurship is the act of creating and running your own enterprise or business i.e. being creative, adventurous and taking risk as you are using your own money and effort to start up your venture by yourself. Accordingly, this organisation is run by an entrepreneur who has a creative idea that he/she wants to transform into a service and/or product needed by customers.
Fredrick and Carswell (2001) defined an entrepreneur as “a person attempting to create a new business enterprise either through spotting a new opportunity or out of necessity, job loss or redundancy” (p.15).