NVAS Africa Day: Entrepreneurial responses to COVID-19 in Africa

Most regions in Africa are now dealing with lengthy corona measures such as lockdowns and market closure. Partly due to Africa’s reliance on the global supply chain and drying up of external financial flows, African economies are hit hard, with prognoses of GDP per capita recovering to 2019 levels in 2024 at the earliest.

Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises are among the enterprises that are most heavily affected by the pandemic, and entrepreneurial activity is expected to have a broad downturn due to substantial risks on both demand- and supply side. At the same time it has been argued that, ‘entrepreneurship as a socio-economic activity provides a way for society to recover from the crisis’ (Ratten 2020: 6) and that the crisis may drive innovation and technological advancements globally, and perhaps even more so in Africa due to its young demographic (Godin, 2020).

The 2021 NVAS Africa Day, with support from the African Studies Centre Leiden, will study the role of entrepreneurship in contemporary Africa, and specifically aim to explore how entrepreneurs across Africa respond to the global pandemic. Themes include organisational resilience, business planning, female entrepreneurship, the (in)formal sector, and more. Moreover, possible intersecting identifications of gender, class, ethnicity, etc. are relevant aspects to take into account when discussing the broad and generalising notion of entrepreneurship.

On the occasion of the NVAS Africa Day the web dossier on COVID-19 in Africa has been extended with relevant web resources and introduced by NVAS Africa Day co-organiser Maud van Merrienboer. 

Read the Call for Papers (closed).

Read the programme and register!