Women run a large share of small enterprises across Africa, yet research on how to support them has often stayed at the level of slogans. A connected series of peer-reviewed studies published in 2024 sets out to change that, and Angela Abhulimen, an independent researcher based in the United Kingdom, is a driving contributor to it, leading several of the papers herself.

As lead author of “Technology Integration in Project and Event Management: Empowering Women Entrepreneurs,” published in the International Journal of Management and Entrepreneurship Research, Abhulimen examines how practical technology adoption can become a route to business growth for women-led enterprises in the events sector. “Used well, technology is one of the most direct routes to growth for a woman-led enterprise,” she says. In a second study she led in the same journal, on integrating artificial intelligence into dealership management software, she extends the same interest in putting usable tools into the hands of smaller operators.

Alongside those, Abhulimen co-authored a sequence of studies with Onyinye Gift Ejike in the International Journal of Scholarly Research in Multidisciplinary Studies. The series is unusually systematic: one paper sets out the gender-specific challenges women face in project and event management, another proposes a conceptual framework for improving practice, a third treats event management as a vehicle for empowerment, and a fourth advances a dual sustainability model for women-led enterprises. They are deliberately specific contributions, not general appeals. Abhulimen has little patience for the alternative. “Inclusion language is cheap,” she says. “What women entrepreneurs need are frameworks they can actually put to work.”

Her work also reaches into the creative economy. As a co-author of “Empowering Female Entrepreneurs in the Creative Sector: Overcoming Barriers and Strategies for Long-Term Success,” published in the International Journal of Advanced Economics, Abhulimen helps set out the structural barriers facing women in creative industries, from access to finance to networks and visibility, and the strategies that support durable success rather than a short-lived moment of attention.

What holds the series together is a refusal to treat gender equity as a side issue. “We kept pushing past describing the problem to designing a response,” Abhulimen says. “That’s the part the field tends to skip.” Across the papers, whether she is leading or contributing, she approaches women’s enterprise as a structural condition for sustainable economic development.

It is a body of work built collaboratively, with a clear division of effort across a small group of researchers. Abhulimen’s particular mark on it is that move from description to design, taking a problem that others have named and proposing a concrete way to address it.