Tonia Warnecke’s research while affiliated with Rollins College and other places

Over the past decade, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have broadened policy support structures for entrepreneurship. After reviewing the core rationale for Gulf state enterprise promotion, we detail regional challenges facing women’s enterprise development, such as the regulatory environment and cultural norms relating to gender roles, then examine how these challenges have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on the gender responsiveness of state policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis, we analyze state actions around promotion of responsive business environments and consider how the policies enacted will impact female entrepreneurs in each country. Finally, we provide recommendations for strengthening the entrepreneurial ecosystem for GCC women.

Kuwait offers a powerful context for investigating the entrepreneurial cultures developing in Gulf countries in response to the concurrent trends of pursuing economic diversification and efficiency, and the constraints posed by cultural narratives that maintain inequality between the sexes. Bringing a capabilities lens to the analysis of entrepreneurship promotion programs means shifting from a focus on meeting basic human needs to ensuring capabilities development. To begin, we discuss the capabilities approach to entrepreneurship with a focus on the necessity/opportunity classification. Next, we review the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Kuwait, including its focus on opportunity entrepreneurs and the legal, economic, and sociocultural framework in which they operate. After considering the impact of Kuwait’s gender-blind approach on women’s entrepreneurship, we conclude with some suggestions for strengthening Kuwait’s potential for capability expansion through entrepreneurship.

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the concern with exclusionary and unethical business practices has led to the growing popularity of social entrepreneurship, which focuses on the creation of social value, not wealth. In this article, I reflect on social entrepreneurship in China, a unique context given the strong communist party leadership and the transition to a market economy. To begin, I discuss the legal and political framework for social entrepreneurship in China, followed by an overview of the sector’s characteristics, including age, size, social issues emphasized, leader characteristics, and the role of women. Next, I provide examples of three social enterprises in China that illustrate the diverse possibilities for this sector as a force for social and institutional change. I conclude with some suggestions for strengthening China’s social enterprise ecosystem.

Some of the most important resources are intangible, such as knowledge and access to networks. In the developing world, technology can facilitate these resources and address basic human needs in a variety of ways: from provision of farmer training and cloud-controlled clean water systems to health information and mobile money services. Some of these services expand access to resources in ways that particularly benefit women. In environments where women are disadvantaged socially and economically, information and communications technologies (ICT) can enable women to access valuable information, consider a broader range of business opportunities, access wider markets, partake in educational programs, and share experiences with and gain mentorship from other women. However, there are large gender gaps in the access to technology, particularly in rural areas. To begin, I briefly discuss the role of technology in development, and consider the extent and significance of technology gender gaps. Next, I review key barriers to reducing these gaps, and discuss the concept of social innovation as it applies to technology interventions. Examples from five social innovations in India — a country with large technology gender gaps — illustrate the range of possibilities for innovative access to and use of ICT for diverse target groups. I conclude with some suggestions for further improvement in this area.