Access to Capital and Women's Entrepreneurship

Girum Abebe, Rachel Cassidy and Toni Johannes Weis

No 11232, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper presents a systematic review of the literature that evaluates the causal impact of interventions designed to enhance women's access to productive capital in low- and middle- income economies. The review identifies 27 studies that meet certain criteria, with wide geographic coverage. Overall, the evidence suggests that grants can spur entrepreneurship, but that such effects are mostly short-lived and not experienced by women operating subsistence businesses. For individual-liability loans, the evidence shows some positive impacts --- but only when credit products are designed to overcome flexibility needs and collateral constraints, and again often only for existing women entrepreneurs with higher baseline profits. The review also identifies an emerging research frontier, focused on the use of alternative data for credit scoring and the development of novel credit products facilitated by these data sources.

Date: 2025-10-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cfn, nep-ent and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/0992104 ... 38e-470041aab29e.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (https://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099210410172511107/pdf/IDU-2b5f8e08-6066-4ae4-a38e-470041aab29e.pdf [302 Found]--> http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099210410172511107/pdf/IDU-2b5f8e08-6066-4ae4-a38e-470041aab29e.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099210410172511107/pdf/IDU-2b5f8e08-6066-4ae4-a38e-470041aab29e.pdf)

Related works:
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:wbk:wbrwps:11232

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().