The influence of indigenous entrepreneurial practices on community resilience in informal African markets: evidence from Nigeria

Indigenous entrepreneurial practices are central to survival and stability in Africa’s informal markets, yet their role in building community resilience remains undertheorised and empirically underexplored. This study investigates how five culturally embedded practices—communalism, informality, indigenous knowledge, resourcefulness, and spirituality—influence community resilience in informal African markets. Using a quantitative survey of 445 entrepreneurs in South-western Nigeria and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), we test hypotheses grounded in institutional and resilience theory. The results show that spirituality and ethical values (β = 0.40, p < 0.001) and resourcefulness and risk management (β = 0.24, p < 0.001) are the strongest drivers of resilience, followed by informality and flexibility (β = 0.16, p = 0.003). Surprisingly, communalism and indigenous knowledge show no statistically significant direct effects. Together, these practices explain 69% of the variance in community resilience. The findings challenge prevailing assumptions about the automatic benefits of social embeddedness and local knowledge, instead highlighting moral capital and adaptive ingenuity as key resilience mechanisms. Policy should shift from imposing formalization to supporting these organic, values-driven practices.