Creating value in the margins: Rethinking value creation, empowerment and women’s entrepreneurship in South Africa’s street food sector

This chapter explores women’s empowerment through their entrepreneurship in the informal food sector, an area where individual value is created that extends far beyond financial gains. Specifically, this chapter will capture an important value produced and reproduced in street food enterprises: that of women’s empowerment. The findings of this study show that in addition to providing a major source of income, significant additional value is created from women’s entrepreneurship as their enterprises produce important empowerment benefits. These include increased capacity to make decisions, the freedom to spend income and determine one’s own future, and the satisfaction and benefits that the enterprises brought to the many women who had significant reproductive responsibilities. Unlike traditional approaches to enterprise development which favour growth in firm size, profits and market penetration; this research shows that an alternative approach to development based on individual value creation linked to women’s empowerment is worth pursuing.