Entrepreneurs Alleviating Poverty Through Educating Their Children

In this chapter—“Entrepreneurs Alleviating Poverty Through Educating Their Children”—we examine the bright-side motivation underlying entrepreneurial action in chronic-adversity contexts. We explore entrepreneurs living in the slums of India, demonstrating that their main motivation for entrepreneurial action is educating their children. In doing so, we offer four important insights. First, these entrepreneurs believe that their children can escape poverty via a sequential process. Namely, they believe that education will enable their children to earn higher income. This higher income will, in turn, enable their children to move to a “better” neighborhood with improved living conditions. Second, working and living in slums can bring benefits to entrepreneurs as these areas can facilitate (rather than hinder) the formation of strong, caring communities that aid in entrepreneurship. Third, slum entrepreneurs often face a paradox in that their reasons (e.g., poor health) for wanting their families to leave their slum neighborhoods are the very thing keeping them there. Thus, their plans for escaping poverty often bump up against the reality of their adverse conditions. Finally, slum entrepreneurs tend to serve as “counterfactual” role models for their children as they became entrepreneurs to provide their children with lives that they neither had nor wanted themselves. Entrepreneurship is thus a means for these parents to help their children but is not the desired destiny they want for their children.