Indigenous Knowledge and Entrepreneurship as a Strategy for Sustainable Development in Africa

Abstract

We problematize the knowledge emanating from indigenous people and entrepreneurship as crucial to sustainable development, yet scholars and practitioners have rarely focused on how indigenous knowledge and entrepreneurship serve as a strategy for sustainable development. To address this, we undertake a wide-ranging literature review of research that in some form explores indigenous knowledge, entrepreneurship and grassroots innovation within a sustainable development context. Our work advances the current debates on sustainable development to consider indigenous knowledge and entrepreneurship as valuable tools in addressing grand sustainability challenges and uncovers implications for the entrepreneurship policy agenda in the process. In particular, we show how indigenous knowledge, entrepreneurship and grassroots innovation resulting from the entrepreneurial actions of indigenous entrepreneurs serve as unexploited idiosyncratic sources of sustainable development and growth in Africa. The article concludes that promising avenues exist to utilise indigenous knowledge, entrepreneurship and innovation emanating from grassroots to achieve sustainable development.

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