Becoming Business People: Entrepreneurship and In/Dependence in Botswana

Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Botswana’s capital city of Gaborone, my doctoral dissertation centers on those promoting entrepreneurship for greater equity, and those pursuing it to transform their economic, personal, and social lives. In the past decade, the state has prioritized micro-enterprise development as a primary strategy to alleviate poverty, empower women, reduce youth unemployment, and promote local ownership of a postcolonial economy dominated by “foreigners.” Entrepreneurship has also been popularly embraced across social strata as men, women, youth, elders, wealthy professionals and the poor and unemployed alike now eagerly describe themselves as business people. Yet far from uniting people, common claims of entrepreneurship are based on tremendously diverse practices that are fiercely contested. There is much debate over what counts as real business, who can legitimately claim to be an “entrepreneur,” and what sorts of practices—including the illicit and occult—may fuel or undermine economic success. These debates invoke class, gender, nationality and generation in complex ways. Through research with SMME promotion agencies, youth-centered entrepreneurship programs, and diverse actors doing business in a single urban corridor, my dissertation project answers the following questions: How is entrepreneurship emerging as celebrated cultural production in Botswana today, and—amidst tremendous inequalities across social groups—to what effects on people’s lives and livelihoods? By expanding “doing business” to include all those practices that support claims of entrepreneurship, I examine how this category of doing and being become socially significant beyond what is visible through strictly economic analyses. Such an appreciation furthers our comprehension of contemporary capitalism’s scope and diversity, and moreover, enables better-informed and more effective interventions to improve economic outcomes and expand opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs today.