Abstract
Prior research on necessity entrepreneurship fails to grasp how religious beliefs affect one’s ability to cope with poverty. Building on a mix-method approach, we investigate how micro-entrepreneurs in Sierra Leone interpret and navigate different religions, religious beliefs and rules, in securing the survival of their businesses. Our qualitative findings show that they do so by developing a complex combination of divine dependency, supernatural agency, and religious elasticity. Results from a between-subject experiment complement these findings showing that religious fatalism directly decreases self-efficacy, but indirectly increases it through religiosity. Taken together, these findings shed light on the cultural context of necessity entrepreneurship, offer a nuanced view of entrepreneurial agency, and clarify the relationship between religion and poverty.