From inclusion to meta-crisis: why I expanded my focus

"Aren’t you an inclusive business expert?" Since I started Future Entrepreneur, I have been asked this question several times. People generally know me as ‘the gender person’ – the one who advocates for low-income women to be included and supported as entrepreneurs and customers. So, why focus on the meta-crisis?

 

 

Since 2013, I have been involved in – and in many cases led – around 35 entrepreneurship programs across Africa, Asia and Europe trying to ensure that products, services, and innovative business models were designed to effectively meet the needs of low-income women as entrepreneurs and consumers. I felt I was doing important and meaningful work.

That slowly changed in 2020, when I began my PhD alongside my job and started engaging with feminist literature and listening to the lived experiences of Kenyan agri-businesswomen. I realized that through my work I had been promoting a very specific form of feminism: liberal and neoliberal feminism.

 

Liberal and neo-liberal feminism

Liberal feminism frames entrepreneurship as a pathway to the self-actualization of individual women. Women are expected to overcome gender barriers through self-determination, freeing themselves from oppressive influences in their lives and achieving financial independence. While this approach highlights women’s strengths and challenges stereotypes about their inability to run successful businesses, it also downplays the fact that privileges, opportunities, and support networks are unevenly distributed. In doing so, it overlooks – and therefore reinforces – existing systemic power inequalities.

Neoliberal feminism is closely related, as it also centers individual women, but recasts them as market actors and ‘agents of change’ for economic growth. In a growth-obsessed capitalist world, this framing is attractive to governments and corporations, which is why it is so popular among policymakers and practitioners. However, neoliberal feminism ignores planetary boundaries, it ignores the colonial past and defines entrepreneurial success almost exclusively through business growth metrics.

 

African feminism

African feminism offers a strong critique of both approaches. It centers decolonization and anti-capitalist perspectives, explicitly challenging extractive systems rooted in colonialism and patriarchy. South African artist and activist Ashanti Kunene captures this perspective powerfully in her poetic provocation, 'Name Me' (see the video below).

Applied to business design, African feminism demands that organizations examine and transform how they continue to reproduce inequality today – through exploitative supply chains, unfair trade practices, or structures that concentrate power and wealth in the (often white, high-income and/or male) hands of a few. African feminism helped me see that the feminism I was promoting did not challenge Business as Usual; it merely tried to mold women and other vulnerable groups to fit into an extractive growth machine built on Northern frameworks.

In other words, I realized that as humanity, we are all in the same car speeding toward a cliff – and I spent the past ten years of my career focusing on making sure there is at least a woman behind the wheel as we drive toward our collective demise.

 

Degrowth and regenerative thinking

This realization opened the door to combining African feminist thinking with other perspectives on entrepreneurship, including degrowth and regenerative thinking. Degrowth challenges the obsession with perpetual economic expansion and calls for reduced consumption and more mindful use of resources. In business design, this translates into prioritizing sufficiency, circularity, and value creation within planetary limits, rather than maximizing profit. Regenerative thinking goes further by focusing on restoring and enhancing social and ecological systems. Regenerative businesses actively rebuild ecosystems, strengthen communities, and cultivate long-term resilience.

 

 

Entrepreneurial success

I remain deeply committed to ensuring that all people – regardless of their gender, ethnicity and class – can thrive on this planet and access equal opportunities and outcomes. But, I no longer define entrepreneurial success as becoming a 'girlboss' with a corner office in a major extractive corporation; I see that as a failure of our current system. Entrepreneurial success, to me, is the ability to build businesses that acknowledge the entanglement with one another and with nature, while restoring the relationships that sustain communities and the Earth. Through Future Entrepreneur, I want to flip the script on the mental models that drive our current businesses and redefine entrepreneurial success as serving a future worth living in.