Enterprising Women in Southern Africa: When Does Land Ownership Matter?
- PDF / 840,053 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 56 Downloads / 195 Views
ORIGINAL PAPER
Enterprising Women in Southern Africa: When Does Land Ownership Matter? Zuzana Brixiová1 · Thierry Kangoye2 · Fiona Tregenna3
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Limited access to finance remains 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. These results suggest that the small Southern African economies would benefit from removing obstacles to female land tenure and enabling financial institutions to lend against movable collateral. Although land ownership is linked with higher sales levels, it is 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
Introduction Productive entrepreneurship and small, medium, and micro enterprises (SMMEs) can provide an essential possible source of growth and jobs for women outside of subsistence agriculture and the public sector in Sub-Saharan African economies (Amin 2010; Hallward-Driemeier 2013; Brixiová and Kangoye 2016). In a conducive policy environment, entrepreneurs and SMMEs also contribute to innovation, technology adoption, risk diversification, and even accessing foreign markets. For women, entrepreneurship can be an avenue to economic * Zuzana Brixiová [email protected] Thierry Kangoye [email protected] Fiona Tregenna [email protected] 1
University of Economics, Prague and VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, W. Churchill Sq. 1938/4, Žižkov, 130 67 Prague 3, Czech Republic
2
African Development Bank Group, Avenue Joseph Anoma, 01, BP 1387, Abidjan 01, Côte d’Ivoire
3
DST/NRF South African Research Chair in Industrial Development, University of Johannesburg, 31 Henley Road, Auckland Park 2006, South Africa
empowerment. Given the potential benefits they bring to society, entrepreneurship and SMMEs have received attention in global policy forums such as the G20. For example, the German G20 Presidency in 2017 identified female entrepreneurship as a growth driver, underscoring the importance of supporting women’s access to credit and business networks, training, information services, and technical assistance. Gender inequality, including in labor markets, and its links to growth and poverty reduction, is another area of heightened policy focus globally. International Monetary Fund research shows that the average annual GDP per capita growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) could be up to 0.9 percentage points higher if income and gender inequality were reduced to the levels observed i
Data Loading...
