African Journal of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Development Research

The papers in this issue resist a single narrow reading of what African entrepreneurship research looks like in 2026. They range from a twelve-month digital ethnography of informal trading communities to a decade-long panel-data analysis spanning forty-two countries; from indigenous apprenticeship systems reimagined for the digital economy to the political economy of domestic capital formation. What unites them is a shared insistence that context — institutional, cultural, infrastructural — is not a control variable to be reasoned away, but the very subject the field must take seriously. We have organised the contributions into three thematic clusters to help readers navigate the issue: (I) informal institutions and digital platforms, (II) capital, capability, and human development, and (III) governance, law, and policy. Each cluster is introduced briefly below and situated against the relevant literature, followed by short synopses of the individual papers.