Alleviating financial barriers for women-owned enterprises in Tanzania.

‘Financial inclusion’ is a necessary precondition for female entrepreneurs to start up and grow their business into a successful venture (Armendariz and Morduch, 2010). However, according to a report by the International Labour Organization on women’s entrepreneurship development in Tanzania, access to finance remains problematic for many female entrepreneurs (ILO, 2014). This project aims to provide hands-on solutions to financial barriers that women-owned enterprises (WOEs) face in Tanzania, thereby stimulating female entrepreneurship as a motor for economic growth and development.

In particular we seek to: a. detect the main financial needs WOEs face during different stages of their lifetime; b. analyze the use, benefits and drawbacks and implementation problems of different funding sources available; and c. assess which financial strategies should be conducted and policy-measures should be developed to overcome these financial barriers. We start from the Women Entrepreneurship Survey (WES) conducted in 2013 by the co-promotor Neema Mori. This survey helps to identify different financial hurdles WOEs face and set up an analysis on each of them. As such, this project departs from the recurring observation that access to finance remains problematic to women, but aims to take that next step in designing effective policy recommendations that can help alleviating the financial hurdles.