Financial Inclusion and Women Entrepreneurship in India: Evidence from NFHS-5 and District-Level Financial Access

financial inclusion; women entrepreneurship; self-employment; India; NFHS-5; microcredit; digital inclusion; PMJDY; women’s economic empowerment

This study investigates whether formal financial inclusion is associated with women’s participation in self-employment and entrepreneurship in India, and whether the relationship varies across rural and urban settings and across education, social-group and wealth categories. The study focuses on three dimensions of inclusion: personal use of a bank or savings account, access to microcredit, and personal mobile-phone ownership. The proposed empirical design uses women aged 15–49 from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), 2019–21, with the women’s work module used to identify self-employment. The individual-level information is to be merged with district-level financial-access indicators obtained from authoritative institutional sources such as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and NABARD. Weighted descriptive statistics, probit models, average marginal effects, instrumental-variable probit models, heterogeneity analysis and robustness checks are specified. The manuscript deliberately distinguishes the published NFHS-5 evidence from estimates that require the researcher’s respondent-level dataset. Published NFHS-5 evidence establishes a strong expansion of women’s formal account use and personal mobile-phone access during 2019–21, while independent analysis of the NFHS-5 women’s work module indicates that self-employment is a much smaller outcome. However, the supplied research material does not contain the respondent-level estimation file or regression output. No coefficient, marginal effect, importance level or causal estimate is presented in this manuscript. The inferential results are explicitly reserved for estimation from the researcher’s data. The study connects demand-side financial inclusion with women’s entrepreneurial activity and proposes a supply-side strategy using district financial infrastructure to address selection and reverse causality. The framework also separates account ownership/use, credit access and digital access, rather than treating financial inclusion as a single undifferentiated indicator.