The Making of the Entrepreneur in Rural Tanzania: The Contested Terrain of Entrepreneurial Discourse, Partnership, and Decentralized Learning Practices

• In Event: Roundtable Session 56
  In Roundtable Session: Invigorating Indigenous Identities and Pedagogies

Abstract

This paper examines efforts by local and international non-governmental organizations to build entrepreneurial mindsets through informal learning activities in a small town in Tanzania. Using methods of critical discourse analysis this paper examines interactions within a “contact zone” in which American practitioners of an international environmental entrepreneurship organization used informal “participatory” educational practices to introduce entrepreneurial practices to Tanzanian women from a local savings and credit group as they met to discuss a potential environmental enterprise. Despite the Americans’ intentions to de-center their expertise and facilitate locally driven and relevant learning and enterprise, the use of unfamiliar participatory practices, effectively served to further strengthen the American’s position, while ignoring the needs and interests of the Tanzanian women.

Author

• Elizabeth H. Boner, University of California - Berkeley