Hustling in the hub: how entrepreneurs sustain ventures through everyday informal practices in Ghana

Informal entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is often portrayed as marginal and transitory, expected to fade as economies formalize. However, informal practices remain central to entrepreneurial life, shaping how ventures emerge and grow. Limited research has examined how such entrepreneurs actively utilize informal practices to sustain ventures within formally organized support environments such as innovation hubs. This study, therefore, examines how entrepreneurs in Ghana enact hustling practices to sustain their ventures within informalised entrepreneurial ecosystems. The analysis draws on 16 in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs from diverse sectors and one innovation hub manager in Accra. The study identifies five interrelated mechanisms through which hustling enables venture sustenance, namely constraint conversion, path reconfiguration, risk buffering, social substitution, and institutional circumvention. These mechanisms show how startups rely on informal practices to navigate resource scarcity and institutional uncertainty. Hustling, therefore, functions as a practice-based entrepreneurial logic enacted through interrelated mechanisms of resource adaptation, diversification, relational mobilization, and institutional navigation, which together support the ongoing process of venture sustenance. By conceptualizing hustling as a productive and enduring entrepreneurial logic, the study advances a mechanism-based explanation of everyday informal practices and contributes to context-sensitive theorizing of venture sustenance and entrepreneurial agency in SSA.