Financial Inclusion and Firm Performance in Ghana: Gender Dimension

Abstract

The principal objective of this paper is to ascertain and examine the presence of gender gaps in the performance of SMEs in Ghana, and to determine the contribution of financial inclusion to the gender performance gap of 1225 SMEs observed in the Gender and Enterprise development in Africa survey in 2015. Using the Unconditional Quantile Decomposition Technique, the findings from the study revels statistically significant gender gaps at the selected quantiles. Financial inclusion positively contributes to the gender performance gap. Constructing indexes from various formal and informal financial products as a measure of financial inclusion and further ranking it to those who are more, less or averagely inclusive, we found that the less inclusive owners of SMEs perform lower than those that are highly inclusive. Being financially included therefore improves the performance of SMEs across gender.