Enabling successful crowdfunding for entrepreneurs in marginalized communities

Crowdfunding is increasingly hailed as enabler of entrepreneurial activities in emerging economies, but micro-entrepreneurs in such countries often lack the required knowledge and skills to adopt crowdfunding activities. This paper provides insights on the readiness of micro-entrepreneurs in Namibia to adopt crowdfunding and suggest ways improve it. For the study, we organized a workshop week about crowdfunding campaign creation for 10 micro-entrepreneurs living in two marginalized communities in Namibia to study their readiness to engage in crowdfunding. Our findings indicate low readiness level due to inadequate learning opportunities, infrastructural challenges, and cultural factors. As a solution, we prototyped an e-learning service for the micro-entrepreneurs which contains information and step-by-step guidance about crowd-funding campaigns an which could be used together with the workshop week to share crowdfunding knowledge to the communities.