Les déterminants de l’entrepreneuriat féminin à Dakar Sénégal[The determinants of female entrepreneurship in Dakar Senegal]

The purpose of this paper is to understand the determinants of women's entrepreneurship in the informal sector in Dakar (Senegal). It aims mainly at a better knowledge of women's involvement in economic activities through the informal sector. The paper does this in three ways: first, by defining the informal sector and the female entrepreneur through a literature review; second, by adapting theoretical models in entrepreneurship to the Senegalese informal sector and by defining the concept of entrepreneurial culture ; third, by making a discriminating factorial analysis and a barycentric analysis, based on primary data collected from 153 women in Dakar, to describe a woman’s belonging to a category of creation: creation in the formal or large informal sector, creation in the small informal sector and non-creation. The results show that the woman entrepreneurial activity from one sector to another depends on her human, social and cultural capital and confirm the importance of social capital in the female entrepreneurship of the developing countries where the informal sector is highly developed.