Conference Paper 17: Digital financial inclusion: A silver bullet for entrepreneurship in South Mediterranean countries

FEMConfPaper17-2024 | August 2025

Title

« Conference Paper 17: Digital financial inclusion: A silver bullet for entrepreneurship in South Mediterranean countries »

By

Siham Matallah

Contributeurs

Note :

This paper was submitted and accepted for presentation at the FEMISE 2024 Annual Conference, “The Euromed Partnership as a Catalyst for SDGs: Advancing Value Chains, Climate Action, Digital Transformation, and Youth Empowerment,” Cairo, Egypt, 10-12 December 2024. The paper was evaluated and peer reviewed by experts, whose contributions are greatly appreciated. The revised version was accepted for publication under the FEMISE Conference Paper series. The opinions and content of this document are the sole responsibility of the authors and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the FEMISE, the IEMed or the AECID.

Summary :

Abstract

This paper aims to carry out an in-depth analysis of the extent to which digital financial inclusion contributes to boosting entrepreneurship in South Mediterranean countries, namely Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia, where entrepreneurs are hallmarked by running into indubitable challenges and more intractable difficulties in accessing finance. The current undertaking has unearthed that digital financial inclusion plays a significantly important role in stimulating entrepreneurial activities in South Mediterranean countries. More specifically, the results provide irrefutable evidence that a mere 1% increase in the digital financial inclusion index has the potential to generate a 5.79% improvement in entrepreneurship in these countries. By the same token, the results gleaned disclosed that entrepreneurship can relentlessly thrive in an environment that guarantees sufficient economic freedom. More interestingly, such results could prove substantially important to policymakers and stakeholders as they clearly show where policy actions to instigate South Mediterranean countries’ entrepreneurial activities are most likely to bear fruit.

Download the Conference paper here