“Resilience Strategies for Overcoming Challenges” A Study of Female Entrepreneurs in Rawalpindi

Abstract

Female entrepreneurs face many hurdles in organising and managing an enterprise, especially a business, which typically requires significant initiative and risk. Pakistan is a patriarchal country where men are dominant and are not in favour of the growth of women in business. The current study identifies and discusses challenges faced, and strategies used by female entrepreneurs to be sustainable and useful in the market. The research is qualitative in nature and has explored the important themes that cantered on two different dimensions, i.e., challenges faced by female entrepreneurs and strategies used to overcome those challenges. Semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted to get insights about the obstacles, experiences, strategies and difficulties faced by female entrepreneurs operating in a patriarchal setting. Data was collected from 10 women entrepreneurs who have been running their business for one year. This study has concluded that women entrepreneurs face many challenges i.e., role conflicts, effect on personal lives, financial issues, spouse support, harassment, work and family balance conflicts and lack of education and entrepreneurial training. Therefore, the participants of study used certain strategies to run and sustain their business i.e., mobile phone technology, social media, discounts, usage of skills and networking.