Entrepreneurial failure in Senegal’s religious SMEs[L’échec entrepreneurial dans les PME d’obédience religieuse du Sénégal]

The objective of this article is to highlight the causes and consequences of SME failures emerging from Muslim communities in Senegal. We relied on the work of Smida and Khelil, in particular through their more comprehensive analysis grid of entrepreneurial failure and the influence of the environment, and even on the work about social constructs of Krauss. In this perspective, we carried out semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs from a religious community who have already experienced at least one failure in their entrepreneurial activities and, subsequently, we processed our data with the SPHINX plus2 software (V5). The results show that the main reason for the failures of entrepreneurs is the lack of outlets for the marketing of products; Added to this is an institutional vacuum correlated with a lack of external support. Failure is often considered by the entrepreneur as a sign of destiny and its consequences are a stoppage of activities, a loss of income and time, without omitting self-criticism by the entrepreneur.