Photo: Building of the UDIEC (own picture)
Author: Felix Brentrup
Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (EE) is a concept developed in the 1990s as a result of a shift away from an individualistic and personality-based view of entrepreneurship towards understanding entrepreneurship as a social process embedded in a local context shaped by cultural, historical, political, economic, and social factors and structures (Friederici et al. 2020: 152; Galperin and Melyoki 2018: 31 ff.). The approach of EE is usually employed in connection with a narrow understanding of entrepreneurship in terms of high-tech and high-growth ventures. Even among African countries, the EE of Silicon Valley is often regarded as the ideal model to aspire to (Friederici et al. 2020: 119; Neumeyer and Corbett 2017: 38).
By far the largest entrepreneurial ecosystem in Tanzania, in terms of number of entrepreneurs and volume of resources, is the one in Dar es Salaam (Galperin and Melyoki 2018: 37). According to the Statistical Business Register Report, in 2015 there were almost three times as many firms in Tanzania’s most populated city as in Mbeya, Morogoro or Ruvuma and more than seven times as many as in the second largest city Mwanza (The United Republic of Tanzania 2016: 25).
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