The sustainability of social enterprises in Nairobi, Kenya: A micro-level agency focus on metacognitive awareness

Recent research suggests that sustainability is closely aligned with social enterprises, which, as mission-driven ventures, create systemic change and deliver sustainable solutions to local communities. While the sustainability literature is primarily concerned with large-scale change, micro-level agency is often neglected. This article addresses this gap by assigning agency to social entrepreneurs through a focus on their metacognition. The study was conducted in Kenya, where primary data were collected and analyzed statistically. The results reveal that social entrepreneurs’ metacognitive experiences positively influence the sustainability of their enterprises. This finding supports the notion that social entrepreneurs’ unique experiences, emotions, and intuitions enable them to make effective decisions that ensure sustainable outcomes. The practical implications of these findings are relevant to a range of stakeholders in the social economy, highlighting the need to foster a sustainability-oriented mindset among social entrepreneurs while also developing their metacognitive capacities. This study makes a novel contribution to the literature as one of the first to empirically investigate the influence of metacognition from a social enterprise and sustainability perspective.