Afro-Entrepreneurship: Protagonism of Black Women in São Paulo, Brazil (Brazil)

• In Event: Echoes Across Place and Space: Blackness, Diasporic Violence, and the University: Exploring the Black Experience in the University From an African Diasporic View and Connection

Abstract

Afro-entrepreneurship can be defined as a political, economic, and identity movement led by black entrepreneurs who have the purpose of fighting against racism and achieving collective benefits that positively impact, directly or indirectly, the black community. In Brazil, black entrepreneurs offer products and services with Afro-Brazilian identity aspects. The protagonism of black women in Afroentrepreneurship is related to the prominence of the black women's movement that has advanced over the last decades and contributes to the advancement of the intersectional perspective. In the city of São Paulo, Pretahub is an organization led mostly by black women, which carries out activities focused on the empowerment of black women entrepreneurs. For more than 20 years, Pretahub has encouraged the consumption of products and services offered by black entrepreneurs through lectures, entrepreneurial education programs, workshops, events, technical training, and hospitality. This movement fosters afro-entrepreneurship and afro-consumption as a strategy to face economic and social vulnerability. The main characteristic is the stimulus to cooperation, solidarity, positive representation of black identity, and political and economic empowerment. Black women in Brazil are the social group with the worst schooling, employability, and economic participation rates in the country. Initiatives like Pretahub generate not only income possibilities, but also political consciousness strengthening, national networking, and positive impacts on the subjectivity of Afro-Brazilian women.

Author

• Eliane Quintiliano Nascimento, University of Texas at Austin