Motivation and Age:
An Empirical Study of Women-Owners of
Tourism Ventures in Ghana
Angela Elijah-Mensah
In Ghana, tourism ranks fourth as the largest source of foreign exchange earnings. Women constitute 65% of the employees in Ghana’s tourism industry making the industry a major avenue of self-employment opportunities for Ghanaian women. The government of Ghana is making serious efforts to develop the tourism industry and female entrepreneurship for the country’s socio-economic advancement. Consequently, a study on female entrepreneurs in the tourism industry in Ghana is justifiable.
While this study helps to address the dearth of research on women entrepreneurs in developing countries, it also contributes to our understanding of entrepreneurship in the specific context of an evolving tourism industry in an emerging market.
The goal of the study is to determine the reasons why women in Ghana choose to establish tourism businesses and how the intensity of such reasons may be influenced by age. The first objective therefore is to establish why Ghanaian women choose to establish tourism ventures. The next is to determine the ages of these women, and finally find out the extent to which age influences the levels of motivations of the women. Data are collected through a focus group meeting and a survey. The focus group data are examined through conversational analysis and the survey data are factor analysed.
The findings suggest that women in Ghana’s tourism industry are motivated by personal, strategic and circumstantial factors. Most of the women are aged between 40 to 59 years. No significant relationship is found between age and the levels of motivation. The implications of these findings for policy, practice and further research are discussed.
