Trust as gendered entrepreneurial infrastructure in Upper Egypt

Purpose This article explores women's entrepreneurship in rural Upper Egypt, examining how trust shapes entrepreneurial survival, obligation, social legitimacy and emotional burden in contexts marked by poverty, precarity and limited institutional support. Rather than treating entrepreneurship as an individualised or growth-oriented endeavour, the article conceptualises trust as a gendered entrepreneurial infrastructure through which economic activity is organised and sustained under conditions of informality and constraint. Design/methodology/approach The study draws on autoethnographic fieldwork presented as narrative vignettes based on engagement with women involved in microfinance-supported microenterprises. This approach centres everyday relational practices such as kinship, responsibility, reputation and moral obligation, through which entrepreneurial activity is embedded in social life, rather than market transactions. Findings Women's entrepreneurial activity is undertaken primarily as a strategy of survival and moral responsibility rather than opportunity-driven enterprise creation. Trust operates through three interrelated mechanisms: risk absorption, through which structural failures such as livestock death or loan diversion are internalised as personal shame; legitimacy mediation, through which women's economic activity is filtered through gendered norms of reputation, domesticity and religious propriety; and welfare substitution, through which trust-based kin and community networks compensate for absent or unreliable state support. Across all three, emotional labour emerges as integral to sustaining trust, with women absorbing the relational and psychological costs of entrepreneurial survival. Practical implications The findings suggest the need for microfinance approaches that move beyond repayment-centred models and are grounded in social relations, emotional labours and cultural contexts, and that recognise qualitative forms of assessment alongside standard financial criteria. Social implications By highlighting the social and emotional costs that accompany microfinance participation, the study calls for less extractive and more contextually grounded approaches to financial inclusion for women in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and Global South contexts, and in particular close knit marginalised communities. Originality/value The article contributes to entrepreneurship scholarship by rethinking trust as an infrastructural condition rather than an interpersonal attribute. By showing how trust operates through processes of risk absorption, legitimacy mediation and welfare substitution, this work brings into view the relational and emotional labour that underpins women's entrepreneurial survival in marginalised settings. Empirically, it offers in-depth insights from rural Upper Egypt in the MENA region, a context that remains underrepresented in gender and entrepreneurship research.