NANA YOUNGE
Black Women Entrepreneurship
“When Black Women win victories, it is a boost for virtually every segment of society” -Angela Davis
According to the 2016 Kauffman index, 550,000 Americans launch new businesses every month. Overall black women represent 42% of newly created businesses and own 36% of all black-owned employer businesses in the U.S. Today black women are the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the United States, yet data shows that their businesses are not as successful because they lack the resources and opportunities needed to build and run successful businesses. The most paramount consequence of an absence of successful black women entrepreneurs is advocacy in decision making that ultimately impacts black communities and the country at large. My purpose was to research why Black women entrepreneurs are struggling to build successful business, conceptualize a picture of our reality and to propose policies that can provide equitable change for black women entrepreneurs.
“Black women endure systematic oppression that is directly linked to a long history of racial and gender inequality that affects their entrepreneurial experience”
“What differentiates a successful business from unsuccessful business is the amount of necessary skills, capital and relationships entrepreneurs have available to them as they pursue entrepreneurship”
The Successful Entrepreneur Theory
What one needs to be a successful entrepreneur is equally entrepreneurship skills, business relationships, and Capital. The makeup or the sum of these three elements is identified as the entrepreneurship formula. On the basis of this formula, I have to come to understand that one element of entrepreneurship should be able to produce the other two elements which means if you have one element you have all elements. This theory means that everyone should be able to obtain success as an entrepreneur. Yet reality proves that Black women entrepreneurs have factors that prevent them from gaining all the elements needed to the fufill the formula. Black women do not have the business relationships and capital needed to succeed. Despite all the skills thst Black women have, they are not valued as they should be in America. Our reality poses a problem, one deep rooted in the systematic policies and institutions that make up our country. Black women need and deserve change.