Unspoken common knowledge in surviving cashless entrepreneurship in Mvuma Town, Zimbabwe

There exists a lack of empirical evidence on the use and role of knowledge in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship research found in Zimbabwe does not offer theoretical explanation nor empirical evidence about the role of unspoken common knowledge in the entrepreneurial survival of a cash strapped context. This paper challenges the research awareness by explaining how rural town entrepreneurs and enterprises are utilising existing tacit knowledge to survive cashless environments. Thus, the objective was to investigate and theoretically explain the use of undocumented knowledge by entrepreneurs found in Mvuma, an environment dominated by cashless small, micro and medium entrepreneurship, to survive the cashless entrepreneurship environment. This qualitative study adopted an explanatory research design and content analysis technique. Textual narratives were collected from a sample size of 15 entrepreneurs operating SMEs in Mvuma Town. Thus, 15 individual face-to-face interviews were conducted, 1 focus group interview and 3 observations using a walk-about-town method. The main finding is that Mvuma Town is a cash strapped entrepreneurship environment and entrepreneurs survive by exploiting readily available unspoken tacit knowledge. This paper contributes to the discipline of entrepreneurship and small business management research. A trajectory of cashless entrepreneurship is emphasised. The paper also postulates that rural town economic development entrepreneurs and enterprises can operate successfully from an effective use of undocumented knowledge.