The Review of the Literature on Factors Impacting Sustainable African Entrepreneurship

Abstract

The process of entrepreneurship is often categorized as opportunity or necessity driven. While the former represents a profitable opportunity as perceived by a potential entrepreneur, the latter in the contrary is associated with entrepreneurship as a last resort, because of any impossibility of finding other sources of income. The distinction between opportunity and necessity based entrepreneurs could also be interpreted as the separation between self-employed and high, growth entrepreneurship. For the past five or four decades, many researchers have attempted to come out with factors that have an impact on entrepreneurship development. However, few researches have been conducted with the focus on Africa. The current paper aims at filling the gap in this regard by providing factors that have an impact on entrepreneurship development from an African perspective. A thorough literature review is conducted with the objective of bringing out the recent research on entrepreneurship development with the focus on Africa.