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Enabling successful crowdfunding for entrepreneurs in marginalized communities

Published: 06 February 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Crowdfunding is increasingly hailed as enabler of entrepreneurial activities in emerging economies, but micro-entrepreneurs in such countries often lack the required knowledge and skills to adopt crowdfunding activities. This paper provides insights on the readiness of micro-entrepreneurs in Namibia to adopt crowdfunding and suggest ways improve it. For the study, we organized a workshop week about crowdfunding campaign creation for 10 micro-entrepreneurs living in two marginalized communities in Namibia to study their readiness to engage in crowdfunding. Our findings indicate low readiness level due to inadequate learning opportunities, infrastructural challenges, and cultural factors. As a solution, we prototyped an e-learning service for the micro-entrepreneurs which contains information and step-by-step guidance about crowd-funding campaigns an which could be used together with the workshop week to share crowdfunding knowledge to the communities.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
AcademicMindtrek '20: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Academic Mindtrek
January 2020
182 pages
ISBN:9781450377744
DOI:10.1145/3377290
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 06 February 2020

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Author Tags

  1. crowdfunding
  2. emerging economies
  3. marginalized communities
  4. micro-entrepreneurs

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AcademicMindtrek '20
AcademicMindtrek '20: Academic Mindtrek 2020
January 29 - 30, 2020
Tampere, Finland

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AcademicMindtrek '20 Paper Acceptance Rate 24 of 45 submissions, 53%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 110 of 207 submissions, 53%

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  • (2024)User Participation through WhatsApp – Mobile Instant Messaging as a Medium for Distributed Co-designProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661625(2143-2155)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Influence of Socio-Economic Status on Indigenous Entrepreneurship Success in Windhoek, NamibiaContext, Policy, and Practices in Indigenous and Cultural Entrepreneurship10.4018/978-1-6684-7578-2.ch007(125-139)Online publication date: 28-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Refugee Entrepreneurial TrajectoriesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36102047:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Hidden Indicators of Collective Intelligence in CrowdfundingProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202310.1145/3543507.3583414(3806-3815)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Digital microwork as a livelihood strategy in a Namibian informal settlementThe Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries10.1002/isd2.1219788:1Online publication date: 10-Jan-2022
  • (2021)A Multi-platform Study of Crowd Signals Associated with Successful Online FundraisingProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34491895:CSCW1(1-19)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2021
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  • (2021)Local tech mediators - a human access point to global crowdfunding platformsCoDesign10.1080/15710882.2021.191277618:4(483-502)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2021

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