Belief in Enterprise

Christian Entrepreneurs and Poverty Alleviation in Developing Countries

Belief in Enterprise is a nine-month research project based on two key research findings. First, the creation of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) is crucial to economic development. Second, religion helps create the social capital necessary for successful enterprise.

Christianity is the world’s largest religion, its adherents constituting about a third of humanity.  It is also rapidly growing, particularly in developing countries. Many of these countries are also undergoing rapid social and economic change that many commentators describe as an entrepreneurial revolution.

This highly entrepreneurial top level project focuses on the convergence of the rise of Christianity and the rise of entrepreneurship. It does so in order to advance understanding of how this confluence helps address one of the greatest moral and practical challenges of the 21st century – the elimination of poverty.

Despite burgeoning interest in development, entrepreneurship, and religion, the nexus between these three fields is largely ignored. We believe this is to the detriment of finding people-centred, culturally-embedded and sustainable solutions to poverty.

We intend, therefore, to take a multi-disciplinary approach focused on the grass-roots of wealth and value creation in developing contexts.  We will explore how the faith of Christian entrepreneurs influences their sense of vocation, the way they run their companies and the social and environmental impact of their core business activities, especially when faced with risk and uncertainty.

Our outputs will target a variety of audiences that mirror our multi-disciplinary approach and our engagement with practitioners as well as academics. In doing so, we intend to analyse and catalyse enterprise solutions to poverty that promote human and environmental flourishing, for the good of all.

The project's staff include Principal Investigators (PIs), Dr Eric Wood, Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town and Dr Peter Heslam, Transforming Business, University of Cambridge; Research Coordinator Dr Carol Christopher; Research Associate Rebecca Shah and a number of Case Study Researchers (there are still some vacancies). We gratefully acknowledge financial support for this initiative from the S.E.VEN Fund in partnership with the John Templeton Foundation. Further details about Belief in Enterprise will become available on the Transforming Business website in due course.