As the urban share of Africa's population increases, the importance of understanding how food supply is shaped by market institutions has grown. However, this topic has received little attention from policy makers and researchers despite the implications of market institutions and regulatory...

The role of enterprise in addressing the problems of deprived urban areas has been an area of emphasis within recent British urban policy. Yet the potential for such policies among increasingly diverse and often highly deprived populations remains poorly understood. This issue is particularly...

Purpose – To explore what type of support is required by social enterprises, how this is different from mainstream business, what the preferred approaches to learning and working with support providers are, and how the provision of social enterprise support can be co‐ordinated and the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how mapping of social enterprises has been carried out in the past, and the challenges being faced by current studies. It pays particular attention to the definitions used and how these definitions are operationalized. The challenges and future...

Purpose – This paper seeks to examine the strategies social enterprises can use to scale up their impact. A traditional view has been for growth to occur through expanding operations or setting up new sites owned by a single organisation. However, a range of other strategies of scaling impact...

Informal market institutions and small-scale traders are responsible for feeding Nigerian cities. This study analyses a range of economic relationships and institutions that have evolved in the context of inadequate formal institutions such as banks and legal contracts. Through examining both...

This article explores the activities and functioning of urban food trader associations in Ghana. These associations are strong indigenous groups of women traders who have been able to sustain cooperation over many years in contrast to many other forms of collective action. They shape urban food...