Women Entrepreneurs from Minority Groups: Best Practices amongst Women from Suriname in The Hague

This paper is a contribution to this field of knowledge of female migrant entrepreneurship, an occupation that continues to be taken up a relatively small group of women. It considers the experiences of ‘successful’ businesswomen from the Surinamese community in and around The Hague, and identifies ‘best practices’ that optimised the development and management of their enterprises.2 The paper pays special attention to the ways in which ethnicity and gender influenced these practices, as well as the women’s own perception of their success. When analysing the experiences of migrant women entrepreneurs, the paper considers two important questions put forward by Baycan-Levent in her study on “Migrant Female Entrepreneurship in OECD countries” (2010). Where these women, in the main, ethnic entrepreneurs or women entrepreneurs? Did the fact that they were migrant and female entrepreneurs mean that they had to overcome “double barriers or, whether in fact were they exposed to more opportunities?” (2010:229). Based on these discussions, the paper puts forward priorities for government policies and policies and programmes to support the female immigrant entrepreneurship and promote these ‘best practices’.