Community empowerment through social entrepreneurship: A qualitative study in waai village

Community empowerment has become a strategic approach to achieving sustainable rural development by strengthening local capacities, promoting community participation, and optimizing local resources through collaborative governance. Nevertheless, community empowerment programs implemented in Waai Village have not yet succeeded in fostering a sustainable social entrepreneurship ecosystem. This study aims to analyze the strategic issues influencing community empowerment in advancing social entrepreneurship and to identify appropriate empowerment strategies based on local contexts. A qualitative case study design was employed using in-depth interviews, Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), field observations, and document analysis. Participants were purposively selected and included the village head, village officials, customary leaders, community leaders, local entrepreneurs, community members, and other relevant stakeholders. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis involving transcription, coding, theme development, interpretation, and validation through triangulation and member checking. The findings indicate that the development of social entrepreneurship is constrained by limited community understanding of social entrepreneurship, inadequate entrepreneurial capacity, weak institutional support, fragmented empowerment programs, and insufficient collaborative governance among stakeholders. The study further reveals that existing empowerment initiatives remain predominantly activity-oriented rather than transformative, limiting their capacity to generate social innovation and community-based enterprises. The FGDs identified four strategic priorities for strengthening community empowerment: enhancing social entrepreneurship literacy among government and community members, improving entrepreneurial motivation and capacity through continuous training and mentoring, strengthening local institutional capacity, and promoting collaborative governance in designing innovative, community-based empowerment programs. The study concludes that sustainable community empowerment requires an integrated empowerment ecosystem that combines institutional strengthening, entrepreneurial capacity building, social capital development, and cross-sector collaboration to transform local resources into sustainable social and economic value. These findings provide empirical evidence for developing community empowerment policies that support inclusive and sustainable rural development through social entrepreneurship.