Cooperative Social Entrepreneurship as a Pathway to Youth Empowerment in the Global South: A Grounded Theory Framework from Rural Morocco

Despite extensive research on social entrepreneurship,, cooperative-based social entrepreneurship (CSE) remains theoretically underdeveloped in non-Western contexts. Drawing on Constructivist Grounded Theory and fieldwork in rural Morocco (80 interviews, 3 focus groups, 8 cooperative sites), this article proposes the Social Entrepreneurship Empowerment (SEE) Model.Extending the JSE four-component definition, the model identifies five mechanisms and five empowerment dimensions,introducing symbolic empowerment as a distinct outcome. Findings show that empowerment through CSE is conditional, contested, and reversible. developed from the Rhamna region, the SEE Model is a context-born framework whose transferability to other Global South cooperative settings requires comparative research.