The study is grounded in two complementary theoretical frameworks. Resource-Based Theory, first advanced by Birger Wernerfelt in 1984, holds that a firm’s competitiveness depends on its ability to access and deploy valuable resources, including financial capital, human capital, and social networks. Institutional Theory, by contrast, explains how external structures, norms, and regulations shape entrepreneurial behaviour and outcomes. By integrating these perspectives, the researchers sought to capture a dual dynamic: women entrepreneurs may lack critical resources, and the institutional environment may simultaneously govern whether those resources can be acquired at all. This recursive relationship, in which institutional barriers restrict resource acquisition and resource scarcity limits the capacity to navigate institutional constraints, sits at the heart of the study’s findings.

To investigate these dynamics empirically, the researchers targeted a population of 11,275 female entrepreneurs registered with the Small Enterprise Development Agency in eThekwini Municipality, spanning industries from personal services and transportation to trade, construction, agriculture, manufacturing, and hospitality. Using Yamane’s formula, they calculated a required sample of 386 respondents and administered closed-ended questionnaires in person, drawing on a five-point Likert scale. Of the 350 questionnaires returned, 349 were deemed usable for analysis, representing a 90.6 percent response rate. The study received ethical approval from the Institutional Research Ethics Committee at Durban University of Technology, and informed consent was obtained from all participants between February and May 2024.

The demographic profile of the sample is itself revealing. Approximately 62 percent of respondents were aged between 21 and 35 years, and 96 percent identified as African Black women. Most respondents, 84.2 percent, had between zero and nine years of entrepreneurial experience, and 60.2 percent reported secondary education as their highest qualification. The researchers note that this concentration is particularly significant in the South African context, where apartheid systematically excluded Black women from economic participation, access to capital, and entrepreneurial opportunities. The challenges identified in the study must therefore be understood not only through the lens of gender but also in relation to race and historical structural inequalities.

Before examining the relationships between variables, the researchers employed Exploratory Factor Analysis using Principal Axis Factoring with Promax rotation to identify latent constructs underpinning women entrepreneurs’ experiences. The suitability of the data was confirmed using the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy, which returned a value of 0.913, well above the recommended minimum of 0.60, and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity, which was statistically significant at χ²(231) = 4134.443, p < 0.001. Four factors with eigenvalues greater than one were retained, collectively accounting for 58.413 percent of the common variance. These dimensions were named Entrepreneurial Constraints, Entrepreneurial Support, Entrepreneurial Participation, and Business Environment and Regulatory Climate. All retained items loaded above the 0.50 threshold, and reliability analysis confirmed internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging from 0.803 to 0.879 across the four constructs.

The descriptive statistics paint a stark picture. Entrepreneurial Constraints recorded the highest composite mean at 4.16 on the five-point scale, indicating that respondents generally agreed they faced substantial barriers. At the item level, lack of capital for business expansion recorded the highest mean at 4.48, followed by lack of skills to grow the business at 4.38 and low profitability limiting the ability to employ additional staff at 4.37. Male domination in certain industries was also strongly perceived as a constraint, with a mean of 4.24. Respondents further agreed that inadequate education, cultural barriers, and family-related interference represented challenges to their entrepreneurial activities, demonstrating that the barriers confronting women entrepreneurs extend well beyond finance into interconnected resource, capability, cultural, and gender-related dimensions.

In sharp contrast, perceptions of entrepreneurial support were overwhelmingly negative. The composite mean for Entrepreneurial Support was just 1.76, falling within the disagreement range. Financial support recorded the lowest item mean at 1.46, indicating strong disagreement that adequate funding was available, while infrastructural support, business training, and business guidance all fell within the disagreement category. Mentorship recorded a comparatively higher mean of 2.64, though respondents remained generally neutral about the adequacy of ideas received from mentors. Perceptions of the Business Environment and Regulatory Climate were similarly unfavourable, with a composite mean of 1.76. Satisfaction with employment legislation recorded the lowest item mean at 1.50, corresponding to strong disagreement, while tax and levy fairness and tax policy satisfaction also fell within the disagreement range.

The regression analysis, however, reveals why these perceptions matter. With Entrepreneurial Participation as the dependent variable, the model was statistically significant at F(3, 345) = 99.160, p < 0.001, and the three predictors collectively explained 46.3 percent of the variance in participation. Entrepreneurial Support emerged as the strongest predictor, with a standardised coefficient of 0.419, indicating that greater financial, infrastructural, training, guidance, and mentorship support was associated with higher entrepreneurial participation. Entrepreneurial Constraints had a negative and statistically significant relationship with participation, with a standardised coefficient of −0.342, meaning that respondents reporting greater constraints tended to report lower participation. Business Environment and Regulatory Climate was positively associated with participation, with a standardised coefficient of 0.299. Notably, the low descriptive means for support and regulatory climate are not contradictory to these positive regression coefficients; they simply indicate that while support and favourable conditions matter for participation, respondents perceive the current levels as inadequate.

Entrepreneurial Participation itself recorded a composite mean of 2.00, indicating relatively low levels of engagement. Participation in women’s business activities arranged by the municipality, having more than two employees, and supplying goods and services within and beyond the municipality all fell within the disagreement range. Business diversification through operating more than one line of business also recorded a relatively low mean of 2.19. However, respondents were comparatively more optimistic about the future, with the expectation of having more branches within five years recording the highest mean at 3.28, falling within the neutral category. This suggests that some women entrepreneurs retain aspirations for expansion despite currently limited levels of participation and business reach.

The findings carry significant implications for policymakers and support interventions. From a Resource-Based Theory perspective, efforts should prioritise enhancing access to financial, human, and social capital through mentorship programmes, skills development workshops, and partnerships with educational institutions. From an Institutional Theory perspective, there is a pressing need to reform regulatory frameworks, simplify tax policies and employment legislation, strengthen support systems, and challenge entrenched gender norms. The researchers argue that without addressing both dimensions simultaneously, interventions are unlikely to produce meaningful or sustainable improvements in female entrepreneurial outcomes. The study also acknowledges limitations, including its cross-sectional design, focus on a single municipality, and reliance on self-reported data, and calls for longitudinal and comparative research to assess the long-term effectiveness of support programmes for women entrepreneurs across different regions.

Subject of Research: Women's entrepreneurship in South Africa

Article Title: Women’s voice in the South African entrepreneurial ecosystem: implications for support interventions

Article References: Mkhwanazi, S. J., & Utete, R. (2026). Women’s voice in the South African entrepreneurial ecosystem: implications for support interventions. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 8, Article 1977451. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2026.1977451

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsc.2026.1977451

Keywords: women entrepreneurship, South Africa, Durban, eThekwini Municipality, SMEs, Resource-Based Theory, Institutional Theory, entrepreneurial support, entrepreneurial constraints, regulatory climate, post-pandemic, Frontiers in Sustainable Cities

The research, published in Discover Global Society, surveyed 193 women entrepreneurs across seven of Bangladesh’s eight administrative divisions: 93 who had borrowed under the scheme, verified against lender disbursement records rather than self-report, and 100 who had never borrowed through any formal channel. Because the women who reach a lender are almost certainly different from those who never do, the researchers could not simply compare the two groups side by side. Instead, they built a statistical comparison. Each woman’s probability of participating was estimated from five characteristics recorded before any loan: her education, her age, whether her business was urban or rural, how long it had been trading, and whether she had received business training. Women were then paired one to one on that estimated probability, producing 61 comparable pairs on which all the outcome comparisons rest.

The headline finding concerns jobs. Inside the matched sample, enterprises run by scheme borrowers employed roughly five times as many workers as the enterprises run by the women they were matched to. Formally, the study reports an incidence rate ratio of 5.108, with a 95 per cent confidence interval running from 3.564 to 7.320, estimated by negative binomial regression, a model chosen because the employment counts were heavily skewed, with a pooled median of four workers but a maximum of 250. A matched non-participant with three employees corresponds to about fifteen inside the scheme. No other predictor in the model, including education, business age, training or investment, came close to significance, which suggests under the study’s assumptions that the difference tracks the loan itself rather than the kind of woman who obtained one.

The authors are careful about how far that number travels. Because the survey was a single round of interviews conducted after the loans were made, there is no pre-loan measure of enterprise size, so the possibility that lenders simply approved women whose businesses were already larger cannot be excluded from the data. Part of the measured difference could reflect approval rather than growth. The employment count also includes the owner and unpaid family workers, so some of the increase may be labour shifting from unrecorded to recorded status as the enterprise formalizes around a credit relationship, rather than genuinely new hiring. The estimate is described throughout as an association consistent with the scheme working, not experimental proof that it does.

What the analysis can do is test how hard the result would be to explain away. Using Rosenbaum bounds, a sensitivity technique that asks how strong an unmeasured difference between the two groups would have to be before the finding lost significance, the employment result holds up to a sensitivity parameter of 3.5 and fails at 4.0. In plain terms, for the fivefold employment gap to be an artefact of hidden bias, there would have to be some unmeasured characteristic, such as determination or appetite for risk, that made a woman nearly four times more likely to join the scheme while being uncorrelated with her education, age, location, business age and training. The strongest measured predictors of participation were location and training, so the hypothetical confounder would need to outweigh both while staying independent of them. That is a demanding standard, and by the conventions of observational research in this field the finding is reasonably durable.

The income result is the puzzle. Household income ran in the opposite direction: scheme borrowers sat in lower income bands than their matched counterparts, with an odds ratio of 0.040. Among the surveyed borrowers, 75.3 per cent fell in the lowest income band, while 97 per cent of the comparison group sat in the second band. The study offers two readings, and its design cannot choose between them. Under the first, the enterprises are on a credit-financed growth path: in the survey year, a much larger wage bill, interest on the loan and money ploughed back into stock and equipment together exceeded the extra revenue the bigger business had so far earned, leaving less for the household. Under the second, the scheme was built to reach women the banks had passed over, and those women came disproportionately from poorer households to begin with, so the coefficient records the target rather than any consequence of the loan. Both readings fit the data, they are not mutually exclusive, and the authors explicitly decline to claim that either is demonstrated. Panel data following the same women over several years would be needed to separate reinvestment from targeting.

One finding needs no statistical caution at all, and it may be the most consequential. Not one of the 100 women in the comparison group had heard of the scheme. Awareness of the circular separated the two groups so completely that it could not even be used in the matching model, because it would have assigned every unaware woman a participation probability of zero. A woman who does not know a facility exists is never assessed by a lender, because she never presents herself to be assessed. Earlier research had identified scheme awareness as a strong independent predictor of formal credit uptake in Bangladesh, compounding the collateral barrier with an information barrier. This study shows that barrier operating at full strength: the loan is already collateral-free, yet the binding constraint on uptake is now simply knowing that it exists.

The pre-matching differences between the groups tell a consistent story about who reaches the scheme. Participants were significantly more urban, more likely to have received business training and older than non-participants, with location carrying a standardized bias of nearly 60 per cent before matching. Refinancing agreements were concluded mainly with institutions in towns and cities, so a rural woman faces a longer journey to apply and her lender faces a longer journey to monitor her. After matching, every covariate fell to an absolute bias of about 10 per cent or below, and no measured characteristic differed significantly between the matched groups, which is the condition the outcome models require. The estimates, however, describe only the region of common support: 32 borrowers for whom no comparable non-participant existed were dropped by the caliper restriction, so the results do not extend to the scheme population as a whole.

For policymakers, the study’s implications are unusually concrete. Outreach at the local level emerges as the cheapest available lever, since the financial design has already removed the collateral requirement that theory identifies as the binding constraint. Expanding participating institution branches and agent banking outlets in rural areas would address the geographic skew in access. And because household income falls in the year of borrowing under either reading of the income result, the pattern argues for support during the first expansion year rather than credit alone. The authors also note that the borrower rate cap has since fallen from 10 to 5 per cent, which would ease the repayment pressure behind the income finding without removing it, and that the fieldwork, conducted in 2018, describes the scheme as it ran before the larger dedicated women’s fund established after 2019.

The contribution is deliberately narrow: one of the first evaluations of this facility to use enterprise-level survey data and a constructed comparison group, reporting a magnitude where the prior literature offered only descriptions. Whether that magnitude is causal depends on an assumption that cannot be verified from a single round of interviews. The obvious next step, the authors write, is to revisit the same enterprises over several years, which would settle both the size of the employment effect and the meaning of the income result. Until then, the study stands as a rare quantified glimpse of what happens when the collateral wall comes down for women entrepreneurs, and a reminder that the most stubborn barrier may not be the bank’s terms at all, but the silence surrounding them.

Subject of Research: Evaluation of collateral-free credit effects on women-led small enterprises in Bangladesh

Article Title: Collateral free credit and women led enterprise outcomes in Bangladesh evidence from a matched evaluation of the Bangladesh Bank refinancing scheme

Article References: Rummana, R., Rahman, M. A., Ishadi, R. T., Ferdousi, D. F., Tima, M. J. F., & Mim, T. N. (2026). Collateral free credit and women led enterprise outcomes in Bangladesh evidence from a matched evaluation of the Bangladesh Bank refinancing scheme. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 264. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00617-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00617-x

Keywords: microfinance, women entrepreneurship, Bangladesh Bank, collateral-free credit, SME finance, propensity score matching, gender financing gap, financial inclusion, program evaluation, employment, household income, credit rationing