Self-employed women and their access to finance: perspectives from the informal sector

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to investigate the factors that impact on the difficulty that self-employed women operating in the informal sector in Mauritius face in their access to finance. Using data obtained from a survey of 158 self-employed women operating in the informal sector, this paper sheds light on these difficulties and also identifies the various sources of both formal and informal finance that these women can turn to. The results obtained indicate that the women rely heavily on their own savings and on informal sources of finance such as borrowings from family and friends. Our empirical results indicate that the difficulty that a self-employed woman faces in her access to finance varies according to the age of the woman, her education level and her marital status. However, the longer the woman has remained in the informal sector, the more difficult it is for her to gain access to finance.