Why do subsistence entrepreneurs start pursuing non-subsistence economic activities? And how do non-subsistence entrepreneurial actions in the agricultural and industrial sectors respectively impact poverty in the entrepreneur’s community? This case study builds on the concept of replication opportunity, the entrepreneur’s imitation of the observable economic activities enacted by her peers, and entrepreneurial embeddedness, the entrenchment of the individual within her community’s norms and values, to develop a multi-level framework of poverty reduction through entrepreneurial activity. The author conducts an ethnography of 104 entrepreneurs living in the rural and semi-urban agricultural communities in the province of Buea, South-West Cameroon. Due to the civil war and economic instability ongoing in the area at the time of the fieldwork, we can distinguish the features of subsistence, agricultural, and industrial entrepreneurship by observing the entrepreneurs’ frequent changes in their personal economic conditions.
The contribution to entrepreneurship theory and practice is threefold. First, the study conceptualizes  passive opportunities, the non-conscious engagement in entrepreneurial activities driven by contextual necessities. Second, in opposition to extant literature, the study shows that replication opportunities in agricultural entrepreneurship can generate significant positive economic spill-overs in the entrepreneur’s community and play a pivotal role in tackling economic poverty. Third, the study finds that industrial entrepreneurship can contribute to non-economic poverty reduction through a process of dis-embedding from one’s native community and re-embedding in alternative value systems.