Women, Social Impact, And Leadership in African Business: A Review of Pathways, Barriers, And Network Effects
Abstract
Women are entering and shaping African business at a pace that exceeds many global benchmarks, yet their movement into senior leadership remains uneven and frequently stalls below the executive tier. This article offers an integrative review of the literature on women, social impact, and leadership across African enterprise, organising a dispersed body of evidence around three connected themes: the pathways through which women reach positions of influence, the barriers that constrain their progression, and the network effects that mediate both. The review synthesises work on entrepreneurship, corporate governance, social capital, and social enterprise to argue that the African setting is not a deficient version of high-income contexts but a distinct configuration of opportunity and constraint. Three findings recur across the evidence. First, pathways are plural rather than singular, spanning necessity-driven and opportunity-driven entrepreneurship, corporate progression, and hybrid social ventures that fold commercial and developmental aims together. Second, barriers operate at institutional, organisational, household, and relational levels simultaneously, so that single-lever interventions such as credit alone rarely shift outcomes. Third, networks function as the connective tissue of the system: they widen or narrow access to finance, mentorship, markets, and legitimacy, and their gendered structure helps explain why formally similar women and men obtain different returns from comparable ties. The article advances a layered framework linking these themes and identifies the social impact dimension, in which women concentrate disproportionately in ventures that generate community benefit, as both an asset and an analytic blind spot in mainstream performance measures. Implications for policy, practice, and future research are set out, with emphasis on network-aware design, critical-mass thresholds in governance, and impact metrics that capture social as well as financial value.
Keywords
women in leadership; African business; social impact; entrepreneurship; social capital; network effects; gender and governance; social enterprise
References
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