The project team includes:
Professor Wilhelm Barner-Rasmussen
Senior University Lecturer Maria Ivanova-Gongne
Doktoral Researcher Muntaser Alhamad
Postdoc. Researcher Linh Duong
Project description
Immigration in Finland dated back to early 1970s, yet the number of migrants were relatively low until 1990s. Since 1990s, the number of immigrants started increasing. While it is popular that migrants relocate in big(er) cities, such as the capital area (Uusimaa), rural migration is not rare. For example, already in the early 1990s, immigrants from Vietnamese families arrived in the municipality in Närpes in Ostrobothnia. Figure 1 shows a map of people with foreign background by municipality in Finland in 2019. Besides the capital area, the proportion of migrants were high in Närpes, Åland, and Korsnäs.
In rural societies, the gender-related challenges and hardships are even more prominent due to the embeddedness of gender relations and expectations in rural areas and the entrepreneurial opportunities for rural women to adopt. Nonetheless, in Finland, rural entrepreneurship has not been widely studied, on top of that, there are even less studies and academic attention to discover the lived experiences of rural entrepreneurs from the gender lens.
Objectives
Address the lack of entrepreneurship research in rural areas in Swedish-speaking regions, and generally in Finland, this project first aims to explore the types of activities, motivations, and experiences of migrant women who decided to pursue entrepreneurship.
The second purpose of this project is to apply intersectional approach to investigate the opportunities, challenges, and the strategies that migrant women adopt to grow their businesses in rural regions.
Spanning over three years (April 2026 – April 2029), this research project focuses on women migrant entrepreneurs living in Swedish-speaking regions. This application is for the first year of the project (April 2026 – April 2027).
