Barriers to Accessing Entrepreneurial Support: Evidence from Rural Women Entrepreneurs in Morocco’s INDH Program

For rural women in Morocco, entrepreneurship represents a hope of surviving for themselves and their families. In the majority of cases, these women are young, married with children and are in precarious conditions. This study aims to investigate the barriers preventing rural women from attending and completing a free entrepreneurship support program. This represents a paradoxical phenomenon that has not been studied in the existing literature. Semi-structured interviews and field observations were conducted to identify nine main barriers, which were subsequently statistically tested on a sample of 100 women who had registered in the INDH's entrepreneurial support program in a rural area of Morocco, using cross-tabulations, chi-square tests, Cramer's V, and binary logistic regression. The results revealed that inconvenient training schedules (B3) emerged as the factor most strongly associated with support status, with women reporting this problem showing markedly lower odds of accompaniment. The fear of wasting time and money without a guarantee of funding (B8) is negatively related to the likelihood of completing the training. Conversely, financial hardship (B9) is positively associated with support, women in precarious conditions being more strongly represented among the accompanied, a result that runs counter to the initial hypothesis and warrants cautious interpretation. Improving logistical and organizational arrangements and taking into consideration the economic and cultural specificities of the population could optimize the number of women gaining value from entrepreneurial support programs.