The Bonding Paradox: How Social Capital and Financial Inclusion Shape the Micro-Entrepreneurial Strategies and Sustainable Livelihoods of Women Street Vendors
Copyright © 2026 ThiMinhPhuong Tran, Van Phuong Nguyen, Quang Dao Vu, Srann Socheat, Thi Cam Nhung Nguyen. Published by Nan Yang Academy of Sciences Pte. Ltd.
This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.
Abstract
Women agricultural vendors serve as crucial intermediaries in the rural-urban food supply chain, bridging the last-mile gap between peri-urban production and inner-city consumption in Vietnam. While they play an essential role in ensuring urban food security, their own livelihoods remain deeply precarious, caught between rural obligations, persistent income instability, and urban regulatory exclusion. This study investigates the "Dual-Layer" impacts of social capital and financial inclusion on the sustainable livelihoods of 296 women agricultural and food vendors in Hanoi, utilizing a Random Encounter Sampling technique to accurately capture this mobile and hidden population. Employing Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), the analysis reveals a striking "Bonding Paradox": while strong rural kinship ties (bonding capital) provide a direct safety net for basic survival, they exert no significant influence on micro-entrepreneurial strategies due to information redundancy. In contrast, bridging ties with diverse urban customers, linking ties with local authorities, and access to formal financial inclusion function as dynamic growth engines. Together, these external assets significantly improve livelihood outcomes by empowering women to execute adaptive micro-entrepreneurial strategies, such as product diversification and spatial mobility. These findings suggest that securing the informal agricultural economy requires policies that move beyond traditional community-based support. Policymakers must focus instead on integrating migrant vendors into formal urban financial and institutional networks, leveraging digital agricultural inclusion, and providing specialized microfinance products to promote genuine livelihood mobility rather than merely stabilizing poverty.
Keywords: Rural-Urban Food Gap, Agricultural Street Vendors, Social Capital, Financial Inclusion, Sustainable Livelihoods, Informal Food Systems
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