Social Entrepreneurship and Transformative Change: Towards a Theory of Systemic Impact in Nigerian Development Contexts

This dissertation develops an original theory of transformative social entrepreneurship and systemic impact, grounded in the empirical experiences of social enterprises that have achieved demonstrable system-level change in Nigerian development contexts across health, education, agriculture, and environmental sectors. Existing social entrepreneurship theory has focused primarily on the characteristics of individual social entrepreneurs and the sustainability of their organisations, leaving relatively undertheorised the question of how and under what conditions social enterprises produce changes that extend beyond their direct beneficiaries to alter the system-level conditions that produce social problems. The dissertation addresses this gap through a longitudinal multiple case study of eight Nigerian social enterprises that demonstrate credible evidence of system-level impact, with case selection spanning all six geopolitical zones and four development sectors. Case data were collected through 80 semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and stakeholder focus groups over an 18-month fieldwork period. Process theory analysis traces the pathways through which each enterprise's activities produced system-level changes. The resulting theory, termed Catalytic Social Entrepreneurship, proposes four causal mechanisms of systemic impact original to this study: institutional catalysis through demonstrated proof-of-concept that changes policymaker beliefs about what is possible; network mobilisation that aggregates previously disconnected change agents around a common systemic goal; narrative disruption that reframes the social problem definition in ways that shift public and policymaker understanding; and market creation that generates economic incentives for broader actors to address the social problem. Keywords: social entrepreneurship, systemic impact, transformative change, Nigeria, catalytic mechanism.