Benchmarking financial inclusion for women entrepreneurship – a study of Uttarakhand state of India

Abstract

Purpose Benchmarking is a very important tool to know the gap in your performance and best performance. It is possible to apply benchmarking in a wide variety of area. This paper uses benchmarking for assessing women entrepreneurship. Women entrepreneurship is a symbol of the balanced growth of the society. Financial inclusion schemes offered by the government are aimed to encourage a large number of women of the country to entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of financial inclusion and others factor like family circumstances, benchmarking, entrepreneurial motivation and entrepreneurial intention of women on their decision to take up entrepreneurship as a career choice. Design/methodology/approach This research study is undertaken to understand the relation of financial inclusion schemes on women entrepreneurship and also to develop a cause–effect relationship. Here, financial inclusion effort is an independent variable, whereas women entrepreneurship is a dependent variable. A sample size of 250 women entrepreneur was taken. The sample was selected on the basis of convenience. Out of the total sample, 125 women belonged to the self-help group and 125 women were registered under the RSETI program of lead banks of Haridwar and Dehradun districts of the Uttarakhand state of India. Findings The results of the present study indicate that there is a statistically significant impact of financial inclusion on women entrepreneurship. It provides the platform to the women that help them in establishing a new business. Research limitations/implications Data for present study were collected from two districts of Uttarakhand. In future, data can be collected from different geographical areas of India for generalizing the findings of the study. Practical implications The results of present study indicate that there is a statistically significant impact of financial inclusion on women entrepreneurship. It provides the platform to the women that help them in establishing a new business. For promoting women toward entrepreneurship, the government has launched many schemes. Social implications After the study, the author found that the society will accept the fact that women entrepreneurship is emerging as a dire need for the country. Originality/value The author followed all the guidelines that were concerned about the originality of the paper. This paper is not under review of any journal.

Financial inclusion in Africa: does it promote entrepreneurship?

“…This theory is empirically tested using data from 31 provinces and 19 industries in China during the period 2005-2014. There are studies that examine how financial inclusion can improve the level of women entrepreneurship spanning from job creation, reduction in level of women poverty in developing countries to macroeconomic objective of improving economic growth. Goel and Madan (2019) support the work of Fareed et al (2017) by stressing that financial inclusion plays a major role in improving the number of women in entrepreneurial activities. Their work suggests that financial inclusion is positively linked with entrepreneurship and it can…”

“…open up economic opportunities for women entrepreneurs in both formal and informal sectors. In conclusion, Goel and Madan (2019) show that financial inclusion encourages entrepreneurship among women as a career choice after taking a sample size of 250 women entrepreneurs on the basis of convenience.…”

“…This means that financial inclusion can improve the level of firm creation, which has been one of the area of policy concern to every government of every nation because of its impact on job creation, economic growth, empowerment and poverty reduction (Fareed et al, 2017;Sethi and Acharya, 2018;Inoue, 2019). It is against this background that researchers show interest in investigating the possible relationship between financial inclusion and entrepreneurship (Wang and Tan, 2017;Jiang et al, 2019;Goel and Madan, 2019). While there are few evidences that focus on this phenomenon, there is no such evidence on it within our selected country data set.…”

“…First, finance is one of the major obstacles to entrepreneurial activities and every entrepreneur is vulnerable to financial restrictions because they need finance to start up and establish firms. Researchers consider finance as an ingredient that carries more weight in allocating effort for entrepreneurial activity (Claessens and Perotti, 2007;Goel and Madan, 2019). Schumpeter (1934) also points out that finance is an essential prerequisite for business activity.…”

Financial Inclusion in India

“…It was realized that females do not have proper awareness of various financial inclusion schemes. Poor internet penetration, lack of education, lack of usage of bank facilities were some of the reasons that were observed for poor awareness related to various financial inclusion schemes (Goel & Madan, 2019). In India, the share of adults with an account has more than doubled since 2011, to 80 percent.…”