Enterprising women in Southern Africa: When does land ownership matter?

Zuzana Brixiová Schwidrowski, Thierry Kangoye and Fiona Tregenna
Additional contact information
Thierry Kangoye: African Development Bank

No 258, SALDRU Working Papers from Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town

Abstract: Limited access to finance is one of the major barriers for women entrepreneurs in Africa. This paper presents a model of start-ups in which firms' sales and profits depend on their productivity and access to credit. However, due to the lack of collateral assets such as land, female entrepreneurs have more constrained access to credit than do men. Testing the model on data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys in Eswatini, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe, we find land ownership to be important for female entrepreneurial performance in terms of sales levels. This finding suggests that the small Southern African economies would benefit from removing obstacles to women's land tenure and enabling financial institutions to lend against movable collateral. While land ownership is linked with higher sales levels, it seems less critical for sales growth and innovation where access to short term loans for working capital seems to be key.

Keywords: entrepreneurial sales; innovation; credit; land; gender; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr, nep-ent and nep-sbm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://opensaldru.uct.ac.za/handle/11090/974 Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Enterprising Women in Southern Africa: When Does Land Ownership Matter? (2020)
Working Paper: Enterprising Women in Southern Africa: When Does Land Ownership Matter? (2020)
Working Paper: Enterprising women in Southern Africa: When does land ownership matter? (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ldr:wpaper:258

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SALDRU Working Papers from Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alison Siljeur ().