Football as a vehicle for development: lessons from male Ghanaian youth

This chapter uses recent interest in the challenges male African youth face as they try to become professional footballers as a way to contribute to geographical research on the agency and resourcefulness of young people in the Global South. It does so by using football as a lens, and Ghana as a case study, to explore how processes at a variety of geographical scales are understood and put to use by male Ghanaian youth as part of entrepreneurial strategies to improve their life chances through football. The overarching argument is that contrary to the socialist early independence era, the Ghanaian football industry is now a hub of financial speculation centred on the export of young players to foreign leagues. Male Ghanaian youth are shown to influence the current state of play in two key ways. Some view owning an amateur football club and trading youth players on the international transfer market as an entrepreneurial venture. Meanwhile others are joining clubs to become Foucauldian ‘entrepreneurs of self’ in the form of a professional footballer. The strategies for life making these two sets of atypical entrepreneurs employ are shown to emerge from their engagement with wider social understandings of development as achievable through the deployment of individual autonomy

The Influence of Social Media on Entrepreneur Motivation and Marketing Strategies in a Developing Country

Entrepreneurs are increasingly using social media in running their businesses. This phenomenon is remarkable especially in developing countries where entrepreneurs now exploit business opportunities by using cheaper platforms. Prior studies claim that social media plays a crucial role in establishing a business and ensuring its survival through effective marketing. However, from the context of developing countries, limited research has sought to understand the role of social media in motivating entrepreneurs to start and market their businesses. This current study seeks to investigate this issue through a field study comprising interviews with Nigerian entrepreneurs. The research explores how social media shapes Nigerian entrepreneurs' motivation to start a business and how they market their businesses via social media. It was found that most of the entrepreneurs interviewed were opportunity-driven rather than necessitydriven due to opportunities afforded by SM. Furthermore, entrepreneurs devised several social media marketing approaches across different platforms to reach their audiences

The evolution of urban entrepreneurship in Zambia

Zambia is a former British colony. It gained independence in 1964 and now ranks as one of the middle lower income countries even though it has dropped from a higher ranking at independence. This history has had a bearing on entrepreneurship development in the country. This chapter discusses urban entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), in general, and Zambia in particular. The chapter further elaborates the social-political factors that have shaped the entrepreneurial landscape of Zambia, and the status quo of entrepreneurial activities in four main urban and large cities in the country. The last section provides an empirical showcase of factors influencing the location decision of entrepreneurs in one of the urban cities, Kitwe. The lessons learned from this chapter are: first, historical events in the urban, institutional environment shape entrepreneurial activities of the present day; second, the four main urban areas in Zambia have developed distinctive types of entrepreneurial activities; and third, besides institutional factors, entrepreneurs make deliberate, personal choices for establishing firms in certain urban locations, primarily driven by the attitude towards avoiding tax, perceived levels of institutional corruption, size of the informal business activities and the overall satisfaction and comfort of the entrepreneur in having the business in the residential areas where they reside

Questions of agency: Capacity, subjectivity, spatiality and temporality

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).Geographies of Children, Youth and Families is flourishing, but its founding conceptions require critical reflection. This paper considers one key conceptual orthodoxy: the notion that children are competent social actors. In a field founded upon liberal notions of agency, we identify a conceptual elision between the benefits of studying agency and the beneficial nature of agency. Embracing post-structuralist feminist challenges, we propose a politically-progressive conceptual framework centred on embodied human agency which emerges within power. We contend this can be achieved though intensive/extensive analyses of space, and a focus on biosocial beings and becomings within dynamic notions of individual/intergenerational time