Stefan’s work on entrepreneurship in Africa has centered mainly on Togo and Nigeria, both of which are low-income countries with storied histories of all sorts of issues relating to development.   Anita asked Stefan first about his paper on bribery in Nigeria during the Boko Haram insurgency in 2014, and his paper on the resilience of entrepreneurs in Togo as violent political protests occurred.   

Stefan explained that his interests are in the resilience of microbusinesses and in how social relationships cultivate that resilience.  In his first paper on Togo, he studied how being located close to violent protests hurt businesses.  The harms were greatest among entrepreneurs embedded in local communities that were exposed to the same violence, but were mitigated for entrepreneurs with outside ties.   These outside relationships helped entrepreneurs find ways forward despite the failures in their home communities.  

Stefan’s second paper on corruption in Nigeria analyzed the impact on business performance of the horrific attacks of Boko Haram in 2014.   The atrocities and violence of Boko Haram was utterly destructive and yet – as Stefan discovered through collaborations with local journalists – some businesses experienced increases in profits.  The reason was that the insurgents provided temporary relief from the extortive bribery that local officials had been committing against entrepreneurs prior to the conflict.

At a high level, Stefan is most interested in the potential of entrepreneurship to address poverty.   Again and again, the entrepreneurs that he studies get held up by things that are beyond their control.   A functional government that creates a reliable rule of law allowing businesses to flourish is absolutely critical, but it is absent in the settings he considers.   What Stefan finds is that entrepreneurs find ways to succeed despite the absence of governmental institutions.

The issue of colonialism and of the role of entrepreneurship training in conveying Westernized ideas into local communities came up as a critical concern in these settings.

Stefan has been thinking deeply about the challenges of teaching westernized conceptions of entrepreneurship in settings such as Togo and Nigeria.   He emphasized the importance of constructing ideas through dialogue with members of the local business community on what makes the most sense regarding the kinds of supports that are needed.  Stefan believes that we must do much more to ground ideas about entrepreneurship in the local context.   Studies have shown that, without this kind of grounding, entrepreneurship training fails to deliver long-term benefits.

What inspires Stefan?

He is inspired by the entrepreneurs that he studies.  Many may seem to struggle, but they convey a level of satisfaction with their achievements that is important to understand.  Much more must be done to understand the foundations of this satisfaction.  Stefan’s newest work on a business training program involves a randomized controlled trial in which half of trainees in Togo receive the standard curriculum supported by the World Bank.  The other half received a blended curriculum that emphasized both standard training and what the entrepreneurs said they needed, which was best practices on managing family-run organizations.    What Stefan found was that the trainees with the blended curriculum blew the others out of the water on both business and family performance.   The insight?  Provide trainees with what they say that need together with what scientific methods say might be important, and you get a win-win.