Interrogating “entrepreneurship for development”: a counter-narrative based on local stories of women in rural Ethiopia

Introduction

Since the appearance of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report “Capacity development: new solutions to old problems” (UNDP, 2002), there has been a growing emphasis in the development discourse on self-reliance of marginalized groups, including women and youth. For low-and-middle-income countries (henceforth LMICs), entrepreneurship has increasingly been seen as an answer to poverty at the grassroots (Gries and Naudé, 2009). This trend is reflected in mainstream development policy and development organizations where “entrepreneurship for development” (henceforth E4D) is seen as a key strategy for sustainable development because of its potential to create employment, economic growth and innovation, support local development and the environment (UN General Assembly, 2014, p. 1), empower women and contribute to gender equality (World Bank, 2011). E4D fits into “the grand narrative of modernity in which development not only implies change but also implies progress” (Ahl, 2006, p. 602).

Entrepreneurship generally has a benign, meritocratic image (Ahl and Marlow, 2012). However, entrepreneurship is not inherently inclusive, and it is strongly influenced by positivistic, essentialist assumptions that regard the male as standard (Ahl and Marlow, 2012; Ahl, 2006; Alsos et al., 2013). Moreover, the emphasis of entrepreneurship research and practice on solely economic phenomena can render other matters invisible (Calas, 2009). The field of women's entrepreneurship has developed partially to address some of these issues. Yet some consider that the field is still in its adolescence (Yadav and Unni, 2016). Crucial for its growth, scholars note the need to embrace a continuously reflexive, critical stance to move past the discussion started by Gartner (1988) and others about who can be an entrepreneur. This requires an “… alternative, conceptually informed feminist critique of the assumptions which have informed the prevailing entrepreneurship research agenda” (Ahl and Marlow, 2012, p. 3). Critical research on women's entrepreneurship in LMICs calls for uncomfortable, necessary questions about the influence of the sociocultural context and the power dynamics of women's enterprises (Bianco et al., 2017; Gupta and Etzkowitz, 2021), while demonstrating the macroeconomic, political interests embedded in the entrepreneurship discourse.

This study contributes to feminist, critical discussions about entrepreneurship theory and practice in international development. Overall, it advances a more nuanced understanding of the role of entrepreneurship in the lives of women in rural communities in LMICs by providing evidence that reaffirms the need for approaches that embrace the complexity of women's enterprising. First, we present the context of the study in rural Ethiopia. Second, we discuss the method of feminist critical discourse analysis which we are employing in this study. Third, we present the “grand narrative” of E4D and two frameworks, allied to E4D, which have been developed to analyse women's entrepreneurship. Fourth, we consider the local stories of women entrepreneurs in rural Ethiopia to consider the adequacy of these frameworks, before introducing a new framework for studying rural women's entrepreneurship in LMICs which, at the same time, provides a counter-narrative to E4D.

The Ethiopian context

The local stories presented in this article derive from the GENNOVATE project, a large-scale qualitative, comparative and collaborative research initiative examining the inter-linkages between gender norms, agency and agricultural innovation across 26 LMICs, including Ethiopia. The initiative also looks at entrepreneurial opportunities and challenges in agricultural and non-agricultural sectors and provides substantial information on the local enabling environment for men and women in business (Petesch et al., 2018). The local stories herewith presented are thus expected to be understood within the specific and highly complex context of Ethiopia.

Unlike other African countries, Ethiopia was not colonized by European powers. This has made the country a symbol of African independence, and later, of the African Union. One of Africa's oldest countries, and the second largest in terms of population (117 million), Ethiopia is predominantly agricultural with more than 85% of the population living in rural areas (Central Statistical Agency, Ethiopia, 2007). It is divided into ten ethnically based, politically autonomous regions characterized by high ethno-linguistic, religious and cultural diversity (CSA, 2007). Besides local traditional faiths, the country has close historical ties with the three main Abrahamic religions, and it is the home of the Orthodox Church, one of the oldest Christian churches in the world.

Feminist critical discourse analysis

Discourse analysis is the collective name for a number of qualitative methodologies for analysing the creation and communication of meaning through semiosis, which comprises vocal, written and sign language (Fairclough, 2012); although, in most analyses the focus is on written language. Critical discourse analysis aims to understand, demonstrate and resist social inequality (van Dijk, 2005) and to address social wrongs, namely “aspects of social systems, forms or orders which are detrimental to human well-being” (Fairclough, 2012, p. 15). Like other forms of discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis focusses on the dialectical relationships between discourse and other elements of social practices. According to Fairclough (2012), networks of social practices constitute a social order and “one aspect of this ordering is dominance: some ways of making meaning are dominant or mainstream in a particular order of discourse, others are marginal, or oppositional, or alternative” (p. 2). Feminist critical discourse analysis brings together critical discourse analysis and feminist studies to demonstrate the complex ways in which “taken-for-granted gendered assumptions and hegemonic power relations are discursively produced, sustained, negotiated, and challenged in different contexts and communities” (Lazar, 2007, p. 142). One type of dominant or mainstream discourse is a grand narrative (Lyotard, 1984). Grand narratives are characterized by their tendency to exclude other narratives (Lyotard, 1984) and by their emphasis on technical, depoliticized solutions to social problems (Dey and Steyaert, 2010). Against this background, the grand narrative of E4D is commonly advanced as the solution to a huge number of widely differing challenges from health to education with a “high level of univocity, unambiguousness, one-sidedness, as well as a quasi-religious makeover” (Dey and Steyaert, 2010, p. 88), ultimately contributing to the depoliticization of social change. This uni-vocity, unambiguousness, one sidedness and quasi-religious approach to E4D can be seen as a social wrong which can be addressed by an analysis of semiosis.

Dey and Steyaert (2010) employ the term “little narratives” to consider the “little narratives of social inventiveness” (p. 97) which counteract grand narratives in three ways. First, little narratives are able to make the social visible. Second, they represent communal experiments at the fringes of grand narratives, making it possible to “imagine novel subject positions and new forms of being” (p. 97). Third, they demonstrate the “prosaic, unfinalizable character” of narratives (p. 98). Although Dey and Steyaert (2010) were unable to go beyond some descriptions of potential little narratives, we use descriptions of entrepreneurship, derived from fieldwork undertaken in rural Ethiopia, as little narratives. However, to move away from the binaries that feminist analyses attempt to destabilize, such as grand versus little, we use the term “local stories” in place of “little narratives” because “… there is nothing grander or more important to feminist analysis than the actual, local, lived experiences of actual women” (Seferiadis et al., 2021, un-paginated, our emphasis). In this research, local stories are used to create a counter-narrative which challenges the grand narrative of E4D by presenting oppositional and alternative narratives. Such counter-narratives are political because they counter the optimism and uniform nature of the grand narrative (Dey and Steyaert, 2010).

This article employs trans-disciplinary critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2012), amended by others in a series of earlier publications (Cummings et al., 2018, 2020a, b), amended again by incorporating Dey and Steyaert's (2010) grand narratives, counter-narratives and little narratives, and then further adapted to incorporate a feminist perspective (Seferiadis et al., 2021). We have tried to track the development of the methodology in Table 1, showing how the approach builds on the previous literature. Trans-disciplinary critical discourse analysis, elaborated by Fairclough (2012), traditionally comprises a four-phase research process: selection of a social wrong that can be analysed with a focus on semiosis; identification of obstacles to addressing the social wrong based on the analysis of dialectical relations between semiosis and other social elements in texts; consideration of whether the social order “needs” the social wrong; and identification of ways of overcoming these obstacles with the use of discourses and narratives. Here, the methodology has been adapted to incorporate Dey and Steyaert's (2010) conceptions of grand narratives, counter-narratives and little narratives, making it more suited to analysis of the literature and concrete examples of entrepreneurship. In this case, the fourth phase is concerned with the creation of a counter-narrative, based on the local stories of women entrepreneurs. For Fairclough (2005), this methodology is trans-disciplinary because it transcends disciplinary boundaries, although others have argued that it is an interdisciplinary approach because it does not involve multiple stakeholders (Cummings et al., 2020b).

The grand narrative

The grand narrative of E4D has been identified through a review of 28 documents and communication materials, dated 2000–2019, from the United Nations (UN) and other multilateral organizations (Lopez, 2020). Policy documents of multilateral organizations often reflect a dominant discourse because of the influence of powerful governments from high-income countries and the private sector in multilateral fora (see, e.g. Cummings et al., 2018, 2020a). Within the E4D narrative, entrepreneurship is understood in similar ways of the World Bank's definition, namely “the activities of an individual or a group aimed at initiating economic activities in the formal sector under a legal form of business” (Klapper et al., 2007, p. 3). In this narrative, entrepreneurship functions as an engine for sustainable development, improves social conditions and gender equality and addresses environmental challenges (Campos et al., undated; UN General Assembly, 2014).

To advance E4D, a series of investments, programmes and tools have been developed by the international development community. The UN Conference on Trade and Development, for instance, developed the “Entrepreneurship Policy Framework and Implementation Guidance” for member states to focus on six priority areas, including drawing up a national entrepreneurship strategy; optimizing the regulatory environment; enhancing entrepreneurship education and skills; facilitating technology exchange and innovation; improving access to finance; and promoting awareness and networking (UNCTAD, 2012). In parallel, the international community and many UN member states, including Ethiopia, have committed to promote entrepreneurship through micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (UN General Assembly, 2014, 2018). According to Ethiopia's “Growth and Transformation Plan II 2015/16–2019/20” (Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, 2016), a core aim of the government is to develop micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises to create employment and stimulate economic growth. This is done by targeting prospective entrepreneurs, including women and youth in rural and urban areas, who are interested in starting their own businesses and developing self-employment; rural farmers wishing to develop agricultural-based small businesses; and small and medium enterprises pursuing business expansion. According to the “Vision 2020 Ethiopia series”, organized by the Ethiopian Economic Association in 2005, entrepreneurship is heralded as a positive economic activity that leads to personal and national advancement, economic growth and poverty reduction, resulting in a virtuous cycle of increased income and production, self-employment and employment generation (see Bezabih, 2006). Micro- and small enterprises, in particular, are expected to contribute to industrial development and create job opportunities and income, especially for women and youth (UN Women, 2014).

For the UN and the Ethiopian government, entrepreneurship is seen as key for attaining the SDGs or, as in the case of Ethiopia, for the achievement of key national objectives. Overall, E4D is a positive narrative that centres on the individual and asserts a series of spill-over effects with benefits for all, including the most marginalized. Accordingly, entrepreneurship in Ethiopia is also advanced as a key tool for development, with economic improvement perceived as particularly beneficial for the empowerment of Ethiopia's most vulnerable populations, namely women and youth (UNDP, undated). The narrative also suggests that investments in women's entrepreneurship are crucial for “smart economics, sound business practice, and essential development policy” (Campos et al., undated, p. 6). However, this overly optimistic narrative can be misleading. A study of “The Girl Effect” in Ethiopia and other African contexts showed how a neo-liberal approach to gender equality can lead to women's instrumentalization, further reinforcing gender inequality at both micro- and macro- levels (Boyd, 2016). This suggests the need for critical and plural approaches (Calás et al., 2009) to better understand the complex dynamics of enterprising in LMICs.

Local stories of women in rural Ethiopia

The local stories presented in this article derive from 32 semi-structured interviews and 16 focus group discussions (FGDs) with a total of 184 Ethiopian women who took part of the GENNOVATE project. The interviews centred on issues related to women's entrepreneurial and innovation experiences, including perceived challenges and opportunities; the influence of gender norms and culture on entrepreneurship; and women's interactions with wider institutional arrangements and structures. FGDs provided key information about the enabling environment for entrepreneurship as well as about local gender norms for decision-making, and for starting and growing a business via vignettes, namely fictional scenarios that allow respondents to describe more nuanced, holistic pictures of how norms fit into decision-making and behaviours (Costenbader et al., 2019). The interviewees were all classified as micro-entrepreneurs, running small, often multiple, informal businesses with limited access to resources and to external knowledge but with access to local financial institutions.

Findings

This section provides an overview of the opportunities, challenges and overall enabling and hindering environment for entrepreneurship in rural Ethiopia, based on women's local stories. The aim is to demonstrate the relevance of sociocultural specificities, personal experiences and gender normative frames, seldom considered in the E4D narrative. The findings related to the 5M and 8M frameworks are first presented before delving into other findings not fully captured within these frameworks.

Discussion

In this article, we have applied a feminist lens to interrogate the E4D grand narrative in the context of Ethiopia which, amongst other things, is advanced as a key strategy for poverty eradication, women's empowerment and gender equality. The 5M and 8M frameworks developed to study women's entrepreneurship demonstrate that both entrepreneurship and gender are social phenomena. The frameworks are based on the original 3M model (market, money and management) which constitute the core elements of entrepreneurship (Bates et al., 2007). Building from these three elements, the 5M framework added “motherhood” and the “meso/macro environment” to represent the broader, complex and gendered contexts that influence women's entrepreneurial activities (Brush et al., 2009). Given that the 5M framework was mostly based on higher-income contexts, Abuhussein and Koburtay (2021) added three more categories (mental health, maturity and maintainability) to make the model better suited to the diverse cultural contexts of the Middle East and North Africa. Overall, the frameworks were useful resources that helped to counter the optimism and uniform nature of the E4D narrative, prioritizing the local, situated experiences of rural women. Likewise, the eight categories underpinning the frameworks were helpful to structure analysis of women's entrepreneurial activity in rural Ethiopia. However, other issues that were only superficially addressed by the frameworks, or not covered at all, also emerged.

The findings demonstrate inherent limitations of the E4D narrative espoused by the international development community and the Ethiopian government, specifically regarding (1) who is and can be an entrepreneur and (2) the emphasis on entrepreneurship as a solely positive activity. Furthermore, the local stories suggest (3) a stronger relationship between certain issues advanced in the frameworks and less with others, which could suggest a revision of the grouping and number of the 5M and 8M categories, including issues that the categories were unable to capture. We discuss (1–3) individually next. Informed by these issues, the 5M and 8M frameworks as the findings, in the final section (4), we propose a framework for rural women's entrepreneurship in lower-and-middle-income countries.

1. Who is and who can be an entrepreneur

The local stories of rural women demonstrate at least two issues that could weaken the E4D narrative as advocated in Ethiopia. First, the local stories reflect a gender normative environment that, for the most part, hinders women's entrepreneurial activities – albeit this appears to be slowly improving particularly for the younger generations. Overall, the dominant gender normative environment in the rural areas of the study confirms men as the head of the household and of the public space and, at the same time, sets punitive social rules and regulations for women. Women engaged in entrepreneurship seem to threaten this order as they constantly defy gender norms by owning businesses, managing income, leaving their residences to work or to sell in markets, or by acquiring knowledge and innovating. Moreover, to a large extent, marriage – which is often decided not by the woman in question but by others – determines women's ability to engage in entrepreneurial activities, with women stating entrepreneurship can often be met with resistance before, during and after marriage, especially from the extended family-in-law. Thus, entrepreneurship programmes in Ethiopia that do not directly engage with gender normative issues may ultimately fail to support women and their entrepreneurial ventures while also failing to shift the cultural perception to understand that women can also be entrepreneurs.

This leads to the second issue: who is an entrepreneur in the E4D narrative? As noted in the review of the grand narrative above, it is participation in the formal sector which determines whether an individual is an entrepreneur or not. What does this say about the women in this study who run micro- and small, informal businesses but still comply with the other elements associated with entrepreneurship, such as innovativeness, productive capacity and overall entrepreneurial spirit? More generally, if these women are not considered to be entrepreneurs, who are the entrepreneurs in Ethiopia, a country with no national unified registry of enterprises, limited and unreliable data on micro- and small enterprises, and a nascent formal sector (Stevenson and St-Onge, 2005; Desta, 2018)?

None of the study respondents mentioned the issue of business formality, neither as a challenge nor as an area of opportunity. This absence demonstrates flaws in a definition that regards the formal economy as the primary characteristic for entrepreneurship, especially in low-income contexts. The literature on micro-entrepreneurship and the informal economy calls on development programmes to strategize on how to integrate the informal economy into broader sustainable development efforts, especially because of the apparently positive role played by the informal sector in low-income households across LMICs (Desta, 2018; Krishnan et al., 2017). Likewise, scholars of women's entrepreneurship highlight the fact that viewing entrepreneurship primarily as an economic activity conceals broader issues, such as “who and what are represented within the main theoretical and research frameworks of this literature and who and what are left out” (Calás et al., 2009, p. 553). Perhaps it is time for a definition of E4D that embraces not only the “otherness” in entrepreneurship (see, for example, Ramoglou, 2013), but also that acknowledges its contextual dynamics and situatedness.

1. Enterprising as a solely positive activity

Much of the promise of E4D rests on a linear assumption that views women in isolation from their contexts and frames them as “untapped potential” for investments that can yield women's empowerment, gender equality and economic progress. The societal pressures faced by women entrepreneurs and the general lack of support for enterprising in rural Ethiopia receives little attention in the E4D grand narrative. Moreover, women's day-to-day limitations and concerns are rendered invisible. Significantly, the local stories show that women find entrepreneurship as a desirable activity and recognize the benefits of having a business, particularly in terms of financial gains, empowerment and social recognition. Yet they also highlight the less benign effects of enterprising including concern for their own personal safety, uncertainty, ostracism, criticism, stress, limited social life, fear of indebtedness and failure that could lead to poverty.

The 8M category of “mental health” advanced by Abuhussein and Koburtay (2021) was particularly helpful to contest the E4D narrative because it centred on issues rarely captured by policymakers, development agencies or even academic research. Indeed, stress, conflict and the overall “burden” of entrepreneurship were highlighted by many women across the dataset. The findings also show some of the structural challenges faced by rural women entrepreneurs, including lack of basic infrastructure, such as paved roads and public transport and gender-based barriers, such as restrictions on women's physical mobility and land ownership. Other challenges include limited decision-making and access to expert knowledge, as well as lack of control of women's own personal finances.

Overall, the local stories provided a nuanced perspective on the E4D narrative, challenging its solely beneficial aspects. In particular, the stories evidence the absurdity of a narrative that places an incommensurable responsibility on the shoulders of individual women often immersed in contexts with fragile political stability, low economic dynamism and restrictive gender normative environments.

1. Expanding the analytical categories for studying rural women's entrepreneurship

The eight categories underpinning the 5M and 8M frameworks were found to be relevant to many aspects of women's entrepreneurial activity in rural Ethiopia, even when the context was very different from those that had originally informed the two frameworks. However, women's entrepreneurship is a complex and multifaceted issue, especially when analysing a context as diverse as Ethiopia. As a result, other issues emerged that were only superficially addressed by the frameworks or not covered at all. These were considered in the “Findings” section under (a) risks associated with entrepreneurship; (b) entrepreneurial spirit; and (c) perceptions of change. Significantly, there were several issues that the eight categories were unable to capture. Against this background, we develop a new framework which provides an analytical resource to interrogate entrepreneurship narratives, arguments or assumptions in rural or LMIC contexts, providing a counter-narrative to E4D.

First, many low-income countries like Ethiopia have societies where the individualized norms of capitalist economies are not uniformly dominant and intertwined with other values, including kinship, interdependence and networks of reciprocal exchange (Carnegie et al., 2019). For this reason, we propose that the category “money” should also consider these issues when relevant. In our analysis, many of the interviewees mentioned the importance of traditional practices that ensure women can benefit from reciprocal capital or labour exchanges. This was particularly important for separated or widowed women engaged in agricultural activities (22 interviews), with some women reporting that their inability to access this non-capitalist form of exchange could risk their entire enterprise (11 interviews).

Second, we suggest the topics encompassed under the categories “management”, “maturity” and “maintainability” be grouped together and treated as a single category. In the Ethiopian case, we found it detrimental to conduct separate analyses for each category, as women continuously weaved together issues of human and social capital, skill and knowledge acquisition, expansion of core competencies, business stability and capacity to analyse and assess their business environment. Certainly, both Brush et al. (2009) and Abuhussein and Koburtay (2021) note the high interdependence across all categories but, in our case, these three categories were particularly intertwined.

Third, the category “mental health” demonstrated some of the limitations of the E4D narrative, including the effects of stress and conflict and the overall “burden” of entrepreneurship for women in Ethiopia. To further strengthen this category, we suggest two additions: include the issues captured under (a) risks associated with entrepreneurship which relate not only to indebtedness but also to the risks of behaving in a way which is not approved by the family or society or making the entrepreneur more vulnerable to being threatened by men, both in the home and outside; and to incorporate the other, more positive, emotions, attitudes and behaviours organized under (b) entrepreneurial spirit. For many interviewees, the latter acted as the key sustenance and driving force behind their initiatives, and was crucial to create and manage their enterprises.

Finally, expectations and norms hugely impact the women of our study, affecting all other categories by restricting women's ability to work, to leave the home, to make decisions, to access markets and knowledge, to develop skills and to make investments. As recognized by the authors of the 5M and 8M frameworks, gender norms play a key role in women's entrepreneurship. Indeed, one of the strongest contributions of the 5M is precisely its emphasis on the broader socio-cultural environment affecting entrepreneurship. Although this is captured under the broader “meso/macro environment” category, we propose it has its own category receiving greater recognition in its own right. We suggest this independent category to be termed “sociocultural environment.” Having this as an independent category matters because “… researchers may recognize that women face resource constraints and, in some cases, socio-cultural constraints, but they make no effort to incorporate distinct measures of these factors into empirical work to detail their separate effects” (Kantor, 2002, p. 133). Likewise, as a single category, it could also more easily incorporate the themes highlighted under (c) perceptions of change, namely improvements in women's status and in women's power and freedom to make major life decisions. In our study, the responses to the “ladder of power and freedom” were some of the most insightful findings. Importantly, and although in our case the study participants highlighted positive changes; this tool could be used in other Ethiopian communities and regions or even in different LMICs to better comprehend women's perceived changes over time and how this impacts their entrepreneurial activities, either in a positive or more negative way.

1. A new framework for rural women's entrepreneurship in LMICs

Informed by the insights gained from the local stories of rural women in Ethiopia, we propose a “7M+model” (Figure 1). Arguably, the model could be more suitable to study rural women's entrepreneurship in LMICs than, for instance, the 5M framework which has been implicitly designed to reflect the situation of women's enterprising in urban, high-income countries – including an overt emphasis on individualism rather than on kinship or extended family relations as it is the case in Ethiopia. Likewise, the 7M+model might also be applicable to other LMICs from sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere where women entrepreneurs face similar issues linked to local social–cultural dynamics.

In this framework, the category “market” remains the same while “management” encompasses money and different types of management, namely financial, human capital and organizational. The category of “motherhood” is replaced with the sub-category “household and family context” because the women in our study placed much more emphasis on their household and family situation than on motherhood. Although caring for children was an important aspect of women's responsibilities and tasks, when speaking about business opportunities and ventures, the broader emphasis was put on their family (including extended family and in-laws) while their household context was emphasized as influencing their entrepreneurial activities. Family was at the core of women's entrepreneurship, it affected access to their labour supply, child care support, decision-making, access to key resources and sources of financial and emotional support. “Household and family context”, together with “expectations of society” and “cultural norms” are organized under the category “social cultural environment” which has been removed from the 5M “macro-environment” of policies and economics, receiving greater recognition in its own right. “Cultural norms” and “societal expectations”, likewise originally derived from the 5M framework as they constituted the macro–meso environment. Expectations and norms greatly impact the women entrepreneurs in our study, affecting all other Ms by restricting women's ability to work, leave their home, make decisions and access markets. In the 7M+model, the “macro-environment”, namely national policies and strategies, were separated from the “meso-environment” (regional support, policies, services and initiatives) to distinguish between national policies which did not appear to have much impact on the women entrepreneurs who took part in our study and regional and local ones, such a credit and savings groups, which did.

Based on the additional findings derived from the local stories, we made two further additions: “entrepreneurial capacities” and “perspectives of change”. The former is made of three sub-categories: “entrepreneurial spirit”; the “risks” of being an entrepreneur; and the “burden” of entrepreneurship, which more closely relates to the 8M's. “mental health” category as it specifically refers to the physical and mental pressure experienced by entrepreneurs. Finally, “perspectives of change” is one of the most valuable additions because it captures women's perceptions of changes in agency and in gender norms over time.

Conclusion

This article advances an innovative partnership between feminist analysis and established women's entrepreneurship frameworks to contest dominant assumptions both in the entrepreneurship field, as well as in development studies. By anchoring the study in the local stories of women from rural Ethiopia, we were able to derive a counter-narrative to E4D and existing frameworks as the stories suggested a situated and more nuanced reading of the environment for rural entrepreneurship for women in Ethiopia, while showing evidence of larger structural issues at play. This counter-narrative challenges entrepreneurship's solely positive effects. These local stories also contributed to a more comprehensive understanding of rural women entrepreneurs, including recognition of their complexity, strengths and limitations.

Consistent with the purpose of critical discourse analysis, we contribute to a more nuanced narrative for E4D, addressing a social wrong in which women's perspectives and voices are unheard and, at the same time, countering the apparent uni-vocity, unambiguousness, one-sidedness and quasi-religious nature of the current narrative. Fundamentally, this study urges policymakers, development professionals and scholars to critically reflect on the limitations and opportunities of E4D, and to consider the negative effects that promoting an acritical grand narrative of entrepreneurship in LMICs could have on women's lives.