Institutional Entrepreneurship in African Fintech

"Why do so many promising African startups falter before realizing their potential? With deep knowledge of the continent’s business environment and rich case studies of fintech ventures, Glory Enyinnaya sheds light on the institutional strains that derail even the most investor-ready firms."

— Vishal K. Gupta , The University of Alabama, USA

Institutional Entrepreneurship in African Fintech explores how technology ventures build legitimacy, navigate institutional voids, and sustain growth in Africa’s fast-evolving financial landscape.

Blending scholarly insight with practical application, it introduces the Change Readiness Framework, which highlights three essential entrepreneurial capabilities—Customer Orientation, Collectivism, and Commitment to Impact—and seven corresponding pillars of institutional entrepreneurship. Together, these elements offer a grounded model for understanding how African innovators transform fragmented systems into functional markets.

Drawing on original fieldwork and case studies across the continent, the book bridges academic rigor and practical relevance, offering scholars, entrepreneurs, investors and policymakers a blueprint for studying, building and funding trustworthy, scalable, and socially grounded innovation ecosystems. 

Glory Enyinnaya is a Nigerian scholar and strategy consultant whose work bridges theory and action in social change, institutional entrepreneurship, and technology-enabled economic growth. She is a faculty member at Pan-Atlantic University, Nigeria, where she teaches innovation, platform strategy, e-commerce, entrepreneurship, and business ethics. A former consultant with Accenture and Ernst & Young, she is the founder of Kleos Advisory Africa, a strategy consulting firm focused on entrepreneurial ecosystems. Her research, published in the Harvard Business Review, examines the role of entrepreneurs as agents of institutional change and proposes strategies for achieving legitimacy, innovation adoption, and sustained growth in complex institutional environments.

Chapter 19 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapter.