获得资本和妇女创业（英）

11232 Access to Capitaland Women’s Entrepreneurship Girum AbebeRachel CassidyToni Weis International Finance Corporation &Gender Innovation Lab, Africa RegionOctober 2025 Policy Research Working Paper11232 Abstract This paper presents a systematic review of the literature thatevaluates the causal impact of interventions designed toenhance women’s access to productive capital in low- andmiddle- income economies. The review identifies 27 studiesthat meet certain criteria, with wide geographic coverage.Overall, the evidence suggests that grants can spur entre-preneurship, but that such effects are mostly short-lived andnot experienced by women operating subsistence businesses. For individual-liability loans, the evidence shows some pos-itive impacts—but only when credit products are designedto overcome flexibility needs and collateral constraints, andagain often only for existing women entrepreneurs withhigher baseline profits. The review also identifies an emerg-ing research frontier, focused on the use of alternative datafor credit scoring and the development of novel credit prod-ucts facilitated by these data sources. This paper is a product of the International Finance Corporation and the Gender Innovation Lab, Africa Region. It is partof a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policydiscussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/prwp. The authors may be contacted at gtefera@ifc.org. The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about developmentissues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry thenames of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely thoseof the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank andits affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. Access to Capital and Women’s Entrepreneurship∗ Girum Abebe†Toni Weis§RachelCassidy‡ Gender, Entrepreneurship, Firms, Capital, Microfinance, Credit[JEL] C93, D14, D25, J16, L25, L26, O12 1Introduction Women-owned businesses are ubiquitous in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs), butthey are less profitable than their male-owned counterparts and usually do not grow (Hardyand Kagy, 2018; World Bank, 2019). Limited access to finance is one of the key constraintsfaced by women-owned businesses (de Mel et al., 2009; Agier and Szafarz, 2013; Morsy, 2020).A broad spectrum of economic factors, such as informality, risk aversion and lack of physicalcollateral — and social constraints, such as norms and discrimination — conspire to reduceboth the demand for and supply of access to productive capital for women entrepreneurs. In contexts where credit markets are imperfect, capital grants and subsidized micro-creditmay help fill the financing gap for both start-ups and expanding businesses. The explosivegrowth of microfinance in LMICs, especially group lending, is in no small part motivatedby the idea of improving women’s access to productive capital (?). There has subsequentlybeen further experimentation with different types of loan and saving products, as well asboth cash and in-kind grants. The expansion of such programs has also spurred a growing research interest, with studiesseeking to evaluate rigorously their impacts on entrepreneurship including by women.Tocredibly identify such effects, studies have increasingly relied on randomized controlled trials(RCTs), comparing the outcomes of those who are randomly assigned to receive grants orcredit with those who were not.A smaller number of studies rely on quasi-experimentalmethods, such as exploiting quasi-random features in the roll-out of availability of credit orgrant schemes, or discontinuities in eligibility. This paper offers a systematic review of studies that test for thecausal relationshipbetween interventions aimed at enhancingwomen’saccess to capital and theirentrepreneurialoutcomes — including business start-up, profitability, and survival.The review aims toaddress two interrelated questions.First, what do we learn on the effectiveness of suchinterventions, and the conditions under which they work? Second, what are the key questions that remain for future research? The review extends the recent reviews of microcredit without gender disaggregation, thattypically exclude grants, and typically although not exclusively focus on joint-liability micro-finance — as featured in special-edition journal articles (Banerjee et al., 2015), meta-analyses(Meager, 2019) and systematic reviews (Cai et al., 2023).1These existing reviews highlightthe disappoint