Abstract
This study aims to test how women’s temporalities, shaped by caregiving, climate disruptions, and competing short- and long-term priorities,affect their entrepreneurial activities. Following an on-site assessment, four main challenges were identified as hindering women’s entrepreneurial activities: (1) the burden of care work, (2) limited knowledge of climate adaptation strategies, (3) restricted access to renewable technologies, and (4) insufficient financial & business literacy skills.
Indeed, on the one hand, women’s time often follows care-related temporal rhythms, limiting their ability to engage in income generating activities and reinforcing power asymmetries within the household. On the other hand, climate change further destabilizes both domestic and business temporal patterns, intensifying caregiving demands while disrupting planning cycles.
Furthermore, building on Omidvar et al. (2025: 28) and their notion of “the ways actors link or decouple competing temporal patterns to manage complexity, promote reflection, or enable coordination across domains,” our study seeks to understand how bridging temporalities through mindset-focused training programs can help women microentrepreneurs cope with these temporal tensions. In partnership with Desjardins International Development, we created an intervention composed of training programs. We invited women micro-entrepreneurs from Thiès region in Senegal and their male relatives to receive a baseline training on business, financial literracy and renewable technology knowledge. After the baseline training, women are going to be randomly assigned to four groups : 1) one group will receive an additional training on women leadership (with a past-present bridging lense), 2) another will reveive additional training on climate resilience (with a present-future bridging lense), 3) a third will receive both women leadership and climate resilience training (with both past-present and present-future bridiging lense, 4) one will be allocated to a control group.
We expect to test whether interventions women leadership, climate resilience, or the combination of both trainings have better results in entrepreneurial growth. We also expect to test whether past-present and/or present-future have better results on entrepreneurial growth.