Developing a Framework for Effective Digital Microfinance: Empowering Women Entrepreneurs in Nigeria

Women entrepreneurs are critical to economic development, particularly within accommodation, food services, and informal trade, with the potential to contribute up to £9.29 trillion ($12 trillion) to global GDP. Despite this contribution, women remain disproportionately excluded from formal financial systems. While traditional microfinance has partially addressed this exclusion, its reliance on physical proximity, extensive documentation, and high operational costs has constrained scalability and inclusiveness. Digital microfinance offers mobile-based, low-cost, and scalable financial services; however, its capacity to deliver meaningful empowerment remains constrained by structural, institutional, and capability-related barriers. This study develops and empirically validates a context-sensitive framework to enhance the effectiveness of digital microfinance for women’s empowerment. Anchored in a pragmatic research philosophy, the study adopts a sequential mixed-methods design. Qualitative data were generated through 18 semi-structured interviews and one focus group discussion with women entrepreneurs in Nigeria, selected through purposive sampling to foreground lived experiences. Thematic analysis supported by NVivo informed the development of a structured questionnaire, which was administered to a total of 500 women entrepreneurs. Of these, 317 completed questionnaires were returned and retained for analysis, representing a response rate of 63.4%. Quantitative analysis employed confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling using SPSS 27 and Amos 28. The study integrates insights from traditional microfinance models, including group lending and Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCA), digital microfinance, and empowerment literature across economic, social, and psychological dimensions. The analysis is theoretically grounded in the Technology–Organisation–Environment framework, Mayoux’s Feminist Empowerment model, and the G20/OECD High-Level Principles on Financial Consumer Protection. Qualitative findings identified nine interrelated dimensions shaping women’s engagement with digital microfinance, disclosure and transparency (D), regulatory framework (R), access and inclusion (A), complaint resolution (C), education (E), legal framework (L), integration and interoperability (I), fraud issues (F), and technology adoption (T), constituting the DRACELIFT framework. Quantitative results demonstrate that these dimensions significantly predict digital microfinance effectiveness (R² = 0.58), with access and inclusion (β = 0.31), disclosure (β = 0.28), technology adoption (β = 0.27), and complaint resolution (β = 0.25) exerting the strongest effects (p < 0.001). Digital microfinance effectiveness has a strong positive effect on women’s overall empowerment (β = 0.71; R² = 0.41). The analysis indicates moderate effects for economic empowerment, stronger effects for social empowerment, and the strongest effects for psychological empowerment, reflecting gains in confidence, agency, and decision-making autonomy. Weaknesses in education, regulation, and consumer protection moderate these pathways and, in some cases, transform digital access into a risk-amplifying mechanism rather than an empowering one. The study makes a substantive contribution by advancing and empirically validating the DRACELIFT framework as a gender-responsive model that explains how digital access, institutional protection, and women’s capabilities interact to produce empowerment outcomes in structurally constrained contexts. Using Nigeria as a case study, the findings move beyond descriptive financial inclusion metrics to elucidate the mechanisms through which digital microfinance influences women’s entrepreneurial agency, resilience, and economic participation. The study is limited by its single-country focus, which may constrain generalisability. Therefore, future research should apply the DRACELIFT framework across multiple contexts, adopt longitudinal designs to capture empowerment dynamics over time, and examine the scalability, governance, and regulatory integration of digitally enabled ROSCA models. Further research is also required to assess how emerging technologies, including algorithmic credit scoring and artificial intelligence, shape gendered empowerment outcomes in digital microfinance systems.