Migrant Entrepreneurship and Business Networks
The emerging African urban economies are characterized by a renaissance of small migrant businesses. In many cities migrant business activities are affecting urban economies in various ways, for example, revitalizing formerly derelict shopping streets, introducing new (exotic) products or fostering the emergence of new spatial forms of social cohesion.
Although these migrant businesses and transnational traders are simultaneously accepted, needed, and depended on as key actors in the local economy at the same time, they are rejected as illegal foreigners, circumventing the rules (particularly import duties and immigration laws), and accused of compounding problems of joblessness, tax evasion and poverty.
A significant number of these migrants setting up business lack access to large financial resources and educational qualifications, they are funneled towards the lower end of the opportunity structure of these urban economies. To survive in these cut‐throat markets, many migrant entrepreneurs revert to informal economic activities that are strongly dependent on specific social networks – mostly consisting of transnational links – to sustain these activities on a more permanent basis. (See Standard Jun, 18, 2019)
• To deal with this latter type of insertion, we propose the use of a more comprehensive concept of mixed embeddedness that aims at incorporating both the co‐ethnic social networks, transnational links as well as the linkages (and lack of linkages) between migrant entrepreneurs and the economic and institutional context of the host society.
• We illustrate this concept by presenting a case study of migrant businesses in Kenya. Here, we focus on both formal and informal activities of immigrants because they have significant implications for the process of socio-economic integration of various categories of migrants and thus of the social cohesion of the whole society.