eThesis - Kauppakorkeakoulun sähköiset gradut

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Entrepreneurship development programs are becoming growingly popular intervention for poverty alleviation around the world. Entrepreneurship development ensures both the capability development of the poor for immediate income opportunity and investment in the production sector for long run economic sustainability and development. However there is very little knowledge about entrepreneurship phenomenon in subsistence setting. The objective of this thesis is to contribute to the knowledge of facilitated entrepreneurship programs in subsistence setting by identifying the factors affecting entrepreneurship process in that context and also the potential bottlenecks of such programs.

The literature review of this thesis presents detailed study of various theories on entrepreneurship and juxtaposes them in relationship to the subsistence setting of Nepal in order to build a theoretical framework based on which detailed analysis of the finding is done. Entrepreneurship is reviewed from the perspective of economic theories, Psychological/personality trait theories, contextualized theories and subsistence setting variables.

The research is conducted as a case study of the facilitated entrepreneurship development program in Nepal called Micro-Enterprise Development Program (MEDEP). Within the bigger case of MEDEP, its district level units and program subunits and entrepreneurs serve as subcases. The data is mainly collected from the semi structured interviews with the entrepreneurs and relevant stakeholders from MEDEP. The data is analyzed based on the theoretical framework developed from the literature review. The theoretical framework maps the entrepreneurship ecosystem into five levels: Subsistence entrepreneur, subsistence enterprise, developing economic environment, diverse social, cultural and political environment, and difficult and diverse geography and ecology.

The research shows that there are multiple factors at different levels of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in subsistence setting that affect the process of entrepreneurship. At the level of entrepreneur it is the need, capability and motivation that affect entrepreneurship process. At enterprise level the affecting factors are technology, management and business differentiation. At the level of economic environment it is the micro and macro-economic factors and access to finances that affect. Traditional and indigenous knowledge, lack of entrepreneurial tradition, and vulnerable political situation and migration at the subsistence setting affect at the level of social-cultural-political environment of entrepreneurship ecosystem. The geographical and ecological factors play both as a barrier and opportunity in the ecosystem. Major bottlenecks of the facilitated entrepreneurship program are dependency syndrome, scale up hindrances, and lack of proper centralized marketing and branding.