Microentrepreneurship Intermediaries: enabling agency and challenging structure for Sustainable Change (MISC)

Entrepreneurship has emerged as an endogenous tool for social & economic value generation with women entrepreneurs commonly identified as agents of change: instrumental in undertaking action in pursuit of positive outcomes. Yet, for many groups – including marginalised & disadvantaged women – the rules of the (entrepreneurial/societal) game define & sustain their oppression relative to other groups1 & drive inequality of entrepreneurial opportunity2. As a result, across disparate contexts, intermediaries commonly exist to enable entrepreneurship for such communities. Of these, some specifically work to address the constraining effects of structure and enable agency. The project explores the enacted role of intermediaries to understand the outcome of interventions at individual (micro) - intergenerational and community/structural levels (meso/ macro). Urban Kathmandu has been selected as the context for the research due to the complex nature of – and incongruence between – (in)formal structures that define women’s roles. Employing an inductive qualitative approach (individual interviews with policymakers (~n=2), intermediaries (~n=6) and entrepreneurs (~n=12)), the project will enable an understanding of ‘good practice’ in intermediary programme/ process design to challenge structure and enable agency; make contributions to national narratives on inclusive development; support the development of future funding bids; and expand the Nepal Social Impact Research Group.