Drivers of Entrepreneurial Activities Among New-Coming Ukrainian Female Refugees in Poland

Populations affected by armed conflicts are often forced to undergo internal or external displacement. The geographical proximity makes the direct neighbouring countries the main destination for forced migrants, and creates challenges in the reception and integration of newcomers. This study aims at determining what made new-coming Ukrainian female forced migrants, fleeing the escalation of armed conflict in Spring 2022 from Ukraine, undertake entrepreneurial activities in Poland as a way of becoming self-reliant and start integrating in the host country, both in the short- and long-term. We used the novel framework, total interpretive structural modelling (TISM), to identify contextual relations among the critical antecedents of the female refugees’ willingness to undertake entrepreneurial activities in the host country shortly after their arrival. Furthermore, the long-term impact of the drivers of female refugee entrepreneurship was evaluated through in-depth interviews conducted 2 years after their arrival. In this paper, we establish the decision-making model of undertaking entrepreneurial activities by new-comers with 13 antecedents, significantly determined by the host-country embedded factors. We discover their nature as drivers, linkage factors and dependent factors, as well as the direct and transitive links between them. Among the three fundamental drivers of entrepreneurial activity in the short-term, namely the attitude of local communities towards refugees, uncertainty about the duration of the invasion and the support of Polish women in gaining life independence by refugees, the latter, understood as the effect of sisterhood solidarity, is the one which acts both shortly after female refugees’ arrival and in the long run, during integration with the host country's society.