ABSTRACT In the last three decades, women broke glass ceilings and launched businesses, and most of them were successful. Rwanda was no exception. Entrepreneurship was considered masculine; women should stay home to raise children and perform homework. Since they broke the glass ceiling to start and run businesses, this has attracted researchers and academia to search for this new force and their contribution to social and economic development. Despite their motivation to embrace entrepreneurship, they face challenges. This study aims to identify the reasons that motivated women to create new business ventures in Kigali and their challenges in doing business. To do so, a social construct of a multi-level relational framework of diversity management focusing on micro, meso, and macro levels was used to find out the motivation behind women entering entrepreneurship and the constraints they face on a day-to-day basis when conducting business in Kigali. Despite women's businesses being launched, they are small in size compared to those of their male counterparts. Also, Global Entrepreneurship Monitor reported that approximately 9.5% of male entrepreneurs started businesses versus 6.2% of women. Women comprise 51% of Rwanda's population but own only 33% of formal SMEs. Emphasising a social construct of a multi-level relational framework of diversity management, they are doing business in three sub-environments: micro, meso, and macro. The micro-level of social reality concerns individual qualities and values, while the meso-level concerns social connections between people and organisations. The macro-environment contains the factors of the external environment that influence the micro- and meso-environments and require an organisation to adjust or make changes to cope with the threats of the macro-environment. Perhaps transform the threat into an opportunity while maintaining the strength and finding a way to eliminate the weakness. It was suggested to empower women entrepreneurs to overcome their challenges to move forward with their businesses, perhaps from small to medium and large. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH The positivism philosophy underpins this study to identify the reality behind the motivation for women to start businesses in Kigali and the challenges they face in doing business. The paper underpins an integrative multi-level research design and a quantitative method to collect 409 survey questionnaires from women-owned SMEs in Kigali. The data were analysed through the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences latest version (SPSS 26). FINDINGS The findings in this paper clearly show how important micro-, meso--, and macro-level variables are in studying entrepreneurship and how useful it is to combine different study units and lenses to fully understand how women's entrepreneurial experiences change over time in any given situation. Most women-owned businesses surveyed were married (79.46%), and (23.9%) obtained startup capital from their partners. And the majority of their businesses were sole proprietorships (93.2%), and they performed well (88.5%). Push factors (72.7%) outnumbered pull factors (27.3%) in the motivation to start a business. Their biggest challenge was a lack of entrepreneurial skills (77.04) that may affect business performance, growth, and sustainability. Keywords: Women entrepreneurs, motivation, challenges, the multi-level relational framework of diversity management, women empowerment, Kigali.

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