Abstract
This paper exposes the ‘dark side’ of entrepreneurship by examining the everyday spatial context challenges facing Jua Kali women entrepreneurs in rural Kenya. Jua Kali is a Swahili term, referring to an informal economy whose unlicensed enterprises operate in open-air marketplaces, literally ‘under the hot sun’. This study relies on 40 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Jua Kali women entrepreneurs from Vihiga and Kisumu counties in Kenya and supported by observational evidence captured in fieldwork photographs for illustration purposes. This study shows the major spatial context challenges women face in Jua Kali include forced evictions and marketplace demolitions; lack of proper marketplace infrastructures; illegal leasing of public spaces, physical intimidation, violence and sexual abuse, which undermine their entrepreneurial activity. Interpreted through a feminist intersectionality perspective, the findings reveal how spatial contexts simultaneously intersect with gender and class dynamics, neoliberal urban policy and political powers, patriarchal societal structures, and institutionalised informal arrangements and practices in the Jua Kali marketplaces to disadvantage women entrepreneurs. In a nutshell, these study advances theory and practice by bringing forth an in-depth understanding the everydayness of entrepreneurship and extends critical entrepreneurialism debate on the ‘dark side’ of entrepreneurship that suggests, by itself, informal sector entrepreneurship does not ameliorate the negative effects of subordination and poverty for women in marginalized Global South contexts. Rather it reproduces structural and contextual constraints that trap women in the same old conventional structures of misogyny in rural Kenya.