Institutional Support, Digital Tools and Bank-Based Financial Inclusion of Women Entrepreneurs in Morocco's Informal Sector: An Analysis of Associated Factors (Revue Internationale des Sciences de Gestion)
Summary
- In a survey of 138 women operating unregistered businesses in Morocco's Fès-Meknès region, 42.0% (58 participants) actively use a bank account for their business.p.10
- Institutional support reach remains limited, with only 25.4% of surveyed women entrepreneurs having accessed a public loan or support program.p.10
- Professional smartphone use shows the strongest correlation with business account adoption, yielding an adjusted odds ratio of 5.06.p.12
- Access to a public loan or support program is strongly associated with active account usage, with an adjusted odds ratio of 4.39.p.12
- Higher education is positively linked to bank-based financial inclusion, recording an adjusted odds ratio of 3.52.p.12
- At the national level, Morocco's adult account ownership reached 44.4% in 2024, but a 19.9-point gender gap persists between women (34.7%) and men (54.6%).p.6
Key insights
- Professional smartphone adoption is the single strongest correlate of active business bank account use among informal women entrepreneurs (adjusted OR 5.06).p.12
- Benefiting from a public loan or support program significantly increases the likelihood of active business account usage (adjusted OR 4.39).p.12
- Higher education significantly increases the odds of bank-based financial inclusion for informal female business owners (adjusted OR 3.52).p.12
- Entrepreneurial experience follows a non-linear pattern, with the lowest adjusted predicted probability of account use (16.8%) observed among women with 11 to 15 years of activity.p.13
- Public support programs reach only a small minority (25.4%) of unregistered women entrepreneurs in the region.p.2
- Moroccan adult bank account ownership rose from 28.6% in 2017 to 44.4% in 2024, though women's ownership lags substantially behind men's.p.6
- The penalised logistic regression model demonstrated robust internal discrimination with an optimism-corrected area under the ROC curve of 0.809.p.15
Topics and entities
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