ENTREPRENEURSHIP
ENTREPRENEURSHIP can be considered a form of empowerment that allows individuals to realise a personal or collective project, starting from an idea, in fact, the resulting enterprise responds to specific market needs. At the basis of business start-up there is a generative idea, capable of producing benefits for the person who has developed the enterprise but, in cascade, also towards the public to whom it is addressed and towards the ecosystem of subjects that revolve around a given good or service.
Entrepreneurship is about creating economic value, certainly, but also social value where the development of a product or service stems from a desire to look to a community of people.
Entrepreneurship is closely linked to the economic and social aspects of the context in which it arises and to the market towards which the enterprise intends to launch its product or service.
In an Islamic society, such as that of Morocco and Tunisia, enterprise and trade can also be seen as a way of responding to the fardu kifayah: the social responsibility to help each other.
In this sense, enterprise is a way to contribute to public and social life.
The framing of gender roles in society, as well as the macro-socio-cultural factors of gender discrimination actually affect the processes of female entrepreneurship, placing further constraints and barriers in the path of starting and maintaining a business idea.
By Feminisms, the accessibility to economical and technical tools and the possibility to be in contact with the know-how useful to create business are considered the keys of emancipation and empowerment of women. As a consequence, women develop a new sense of self, more awareness about their own capabilities, they become more secure of their idea and more able to interact and to contribute to the social, political, cultural and economic development of their countries and gender movements.
In fact, the start-up of a business is based on access to the means for its development (assets), on the entrepreneurial skills of those who want to develop their idea and on self-awareness with respect to themselves, on a social and political system capable of enhancing the entrepreneurial spirit of its community, through policies and regulations that reduce the cultural distortions and biases that may be present in a given society.
Entrepreneurship, in fact, not only responds to market, economic and financial logics, but also favours the achievement of wellbeing and satisfaction of the people who engage in these enterprises, through the production of economic and social value and active participation in the economic life of their own context.
WEPROPOSE, starting from this perspective, wants to analyse the models that in Morocco and Tunisia facilitate or limit the start-up of enterprises by women returning after a period in Italy and, to contribute to the development of initiatives that, in these territories, look at female entrepreneurship as a tool for individual and collective empowerment.
