Petty Traders Challenge Bureaucratic Barriers at Kumasi’s Kejetia Market
Kejetia Market in Kumasi, Ghana, is one of West Africa’s oldest and largest marketplaces, drawing an average of 25,000 visitors a day. Over the past decade, this massive and labyrinthine trade hub has been reshaped by substantial foreign investment. In a recent study published in the Journal of Business Venturing, Arielle Newman, assistant professor of entrepreneurship, explores the collective response to restrictions placed on some of the market’s most long-standing participants.
Between 2017 and 2021, she visited Kumasi several times and followed the years-long fight of petty traders trying to gain access to new stalls despite lacking formal registration. “It was mind-blowing,” Newman said. “This was the first time informal entrepreneurs sued the government and won.”
Newman’s paper—co-authored with Alexander Lewis, assistant professor of management at the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Alvarez College of Business, and Ryan Coles, assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at the University of Connecticut—uses process tracing to examine the traders’ struggle through two key lenses. Emancipatory entrepreneurship looks at how entrepreneurs remove constraints on their actions, while the postcolonial perspective acknowledges the legacy of colonization.
The researchers show that the traders secured a place at the new market by leveraging their indigenous cultural capital within Western bureaucratic structures. Central to this victory was the Petty Traders’ Association (PTA), formed around the Ashanti principle of Nyansapo, a philosophy that emphasizes collective wisdom, mutual support and community interdependence. Drawing on these cultural traditions, traders mobilized broad familial and social networks, forging alliances with formally registered stall owners and even appealing to the Ashanti king—whose influence spans traditional and modern political realms—and organizing around their Ashanti identity and political party.
“So much literature describes indigenous business practices as an institutional void—and this paper is a direct challenge to that view,” Newman explained. “We witnessed an incredibly robust system of self-organization built on deep cultural connections. This calls us to rethink how we look for and measure value and how we design policies and programs that reflect people’s real, lived experiences.”
Newman hopes this research will inspire scholars and policy makers to look beyond formal systems when analyzing entrepreneurship in developing economies. “If we continue to overlook these communal traditions,” she concluded, “we will continue to reproduce inequality rather than empowering those most invested in creating sustainable, inclusive economies.”
Newman, A., Lewis, A. and Coles, R. (2025). Emancipatory Entrepreneurship in Postcolonial Economies: The Clash of Institutional Systems in the Kejetia Marketplace. Journal of Business Venturing.