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Rural entrepreneurship is an important employment generation intervention for the fastgrowing young labour force in developing countries. Many bottlenecks including access to finance impede rural youths to perform in their new ventures. This paper examines the impact of access to finance on rural youths' entrepreneurship in Benin using data from the second wave of the School-To-Work Transition (SWTS) survey involving over 900 youths. The paper employs the endogenous switching regression technique (ESR), combined with propensity score matching, to investigate the drivers of rural youths' access to finance and its impact on entrepreneurship intention and performance. The results indicate that age, education, poverty status, experience, working in the agricultural sector and the existence of a bank branch are important determinants of rural youths' access to finance. The results also show that access to finance increases the probability of youth's entrepreneurship by 15.2% on average. Similarly, the turnover increased by 15.86% for the youths who accessed finance. Moreover, the study shows a significant gender gap in rural entrepreneurship of 5.24% among youths that had access to finance in Benin. These results suggest that policymakers should encourage formal financial institutions to reduce their credit eligibility conditions for youths who do not have collateral.

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