Empowering women in rural India: characteristics and intentions for sustainable entrepreneurship

This study aims to enhance the understanding of individual-level factors that influence rural women’s intentions to engage in sustainable entrepreneurship in India. This study explores the direct impact of perceived capability, social perception, and individual competencies on women’s sustainable entrepreneurial intention (SEI). In addition, this study investigated how these variables indirectly affect perceived opportunities. A quantitative methodology was used, with randomly distributed questionnaires among rural women in India. A total of 1250 responses were collected and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) with partial least squares (PLS). The results revealed that perceived capability (β = 0.103), individual competencies (β = 0.052), and social perception (β = 0.226) significantly and positively influenced the SEI. Furthermore, this study indicates that perceived opportunity serves as a mediator in the relationships between perceived capability, social perception, individual competencies, and SEI of women. The proposed model explained 50.9% of the variance in SEI. This study contributes to the existing literature by empirically analyzing the connection between the individual characteristics of women and their intentions to pursue sustainable entrepreneurship, focusing specifically on rural women in India.