Motivations and Barriers to Female Entrepreneurship: Insights from Morocco

Entrepreneurship is a complex, multidimensional phenomenon that is associated with value creation and considered a driver of economic development. While Africa exhibits a strong upsurge in the number of women entrepreneurs, the continent is still struggling in terms of gender equality and women’s empowerment. The region is entrepreneurially disadvantaged, with a low degree of female participation in this field and a large gender gap in favor of men. Therefore, this paper aims to present original insights into female entrepreneurship from the context of Morocco, exploring the motivations and barriers to women entrepreneurs in the service sector. It adopts a multi-level integrative framework and combines feminist and institutional theory to capture the agency and enabling factors along with institutional regulative and normative constraints associated with female entrepreneurship. The paper adopts an interpretative qualitative research approach capitalizing on in-depth interviews with twenty women entrepreneurs in the service sector. The data is analyzed using thematic coding and identified factors are classified into micro-meso-macro levels. The findings highlight the importance of integrating multiple lens and levels of analysis to capture the complexity of the phenomenon and illustrate the imbrication and interplay of enablers and constraints and contribute theoretically and empirically to knowledge on female entrepreneurship in the North African context and a factor-driven economy through the case of Morocco.