Migrant Entrepreneurship and Digital Technologies in the Global South : Navigating Exclusion, Informality and Innovation

This book explores how migrants use digital tools and platforms to build and sustain businesses in environments shaped by legal uncertainty, fragmented governance, uneven infrastructure, and limited institutional support.

Digital technologies are reshaping the conditions under which migrant entrepreneurs operate in the Global South. This book explores how migrants use digital tools and platforms to build and sustain businesses in environments shaped by legal uncertainty, fragmented governance, uneven infrastructure and limited institutional support. It examines how digital systems both enable and constrain enterprise activity, with a particular focus on mobile finance, platform economies and transnational digital networks. Rather than assuming that digital access guarantees inclusion, the book shows how migrant entrepreneurs adapt to exclusion, legal uncertainty and infrastructural instability. It introduces the Digital Constraint Navigation Framework (DCNF), integrating digital embeddedness and intersectionality to explain how legal status, gender, class, ethnicity and related social positions shape access to platforms, financial systems and market opportunities. While the term “Global South” is used for scope, the book recognises its internal diversity through comparative, country-based analysis. By integrating these perspectives across diverse regulatory and infrastructural settings, the book develops a comparative framework for understanding migrant entrepreneurship beyond dominant Global North models of entrepreneurial inclusion. It will be of interest to scholars, students and professionals in entrepreneurship, migration, international business, development studies and digital economy research.