Institutional Support, Digital Tools and Bank-Based Financial Inclusion of Women Entrepreneurs in Morocco's Informal Sector: An Analysis of Associated Factors

Rezumat

Whether a woman entrepreneur in Morocco's informal sector gains access to the banking system is not determined by economic characteristics alone. Between the application and the effective use of an account, institutional, formal and discretionary filters may intervene; institutional theory and the notion of bank gatekeeping provide a theoretical lens for interpreting these processes. Bank gatekeeping is not directly measured in the present survey. This article examines the characteristics associated with the active use of a business bank account among 138 women entrepreneurs running unregistered businesses in the Fès-Meknès region. A binary logistic regression estimated by Firth's penalized likelihood and internally validated by bootstrap resampling relates this outcome to the entrepreneur's profile, the productive resources of her business, her professional use of digital tools and her access to institutional support. Two associations are both large and stable across alternative specifications: professional use of a smartphone (adjusted odds ratio 5.06; 95% CI 2.15–12.94) and access to a public loan or support program (4.39; 95% CI 1.69–12.37). Higher education is also positively associated with bank-based financial inclusion (adjusted odds ratio 3.52; 95% CI 1.46–9.04). Entrepreneurial tenure follows no monotonic gradient: the adjusted probability of bank-based financial inclusion is lowest among women with 11 to 15 years of activity and partially recovers beyond 16 years. The optimism-corrected area under the ROC curve is 0.809. The results identify two distinct characteristics associated with participation in formal finance, one related to institutional support and the other to professional digital use, while showing how narrow the reach of institutional support remains (25.4% of participants). Given the cross-sectional design, all findings are associations rather than causal effects.