Is digital finance helping women entrepreneurs in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) overcome old barriers, or building new ones? The honest answer is: both, at the same time. Which one wins out depends entirely on whether there was intentional design behind the tools in the first place.
The global MSME finance gap for women stands at USD $1.9 trillion. Seven-in-ten formal women-owned SMEs in developing countries remain underserved or unable to access finance (IFC, 2025).
Digital financial infrastructure cannot close that gap on its own, but it can make it cheaper and easier for women to make their first formal financial transactions – often a critical first step into the financial system.
But access is only the beginning. The harder question is whether that first transaction eventually translates into the credit, savings and investment women entrepreneurs need to grow.
Ambition is growing
Digital tools are genuinely helping to dismantle the traditional barriers to women’s financial inclusion – including mobility constraints, social norms and a lack of collateral. Mobile money agents put a transaction point at one’s fingertips instead of at a bank branch, easing the mobility and social-norm friction of visiting one in person, while alternative data (mobile top-ups, utility payments) can substitute for the collateral many women lack. But access to the digital tools themselves remains unequal.
Across MENA, there is still a 14-to-25-point gender gap in mobile phone ownership, and you cannot use a mobile wallet without a mobile phone.
Against that backdrop, momentum is building across the Southern Mediterranean to expand access. Under the EU-OECD Programme Women’s Economic Empowerment in the Southern Mediterranean: Enhancing Women Entrepreneurs’ Financial Inclusion and Access to Finance in the Digital Age, six economies (Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority) are simultaneously developing Action Plans on women’s financial inclusion, each with named champions, data commitments and regulatory reforms.
- Jordan’s Central Bank has set a national target to cut the gender gap in financial account ownership (the metric CBJ tracks) from 22% to 12% by 2028.
- Morocco launched a 16-institution Coalition for Women’s Financial Inclusion in early 2026, with the first signatories to the WE Finance Code already on board.
- The Palestinian Monetary Authority now assigns favourable credit-score weightings to women-led MSMEs.
- Egypt’s Tahweesha mobile nano-bank has reached over 366,000 women and generated 11,000 micro-businesses.
- Tunisia is operationalising a crowdfunding law with an explicit gender focus. This is not one country’s success story; it is a region building the architecture of women’s financial inclusion in real time.
Egypt’s big leap
Egypt is one country in which progress is already highly visible. Women’s financial inclusion (measured by active account ownership) rose from 19% in 2016 to 71% by the end of 2025 (Central Bank of Egypt). The NilePreneurs initiative has served over 127,000 women entrepreneurs through 125 business development centres across 25 governorates. And since 2024, the WE Finance Code has started generating something we did not have before: gender-disaggregated data on women who interact with the financial system but have never borrowed.
For years, policy decisions were made based on the women we could see. We can now start to map the ones we could not.
These are significant gains. But they mostly tell us whether women are entering and engaging with the financial system. They tell us much less about what happens next: whether a woman entrepreneur can secure the finance she needs to invest, hire and grow.
From access to growth
But fintech can also introduce new forms of exclusion. Credit-scoring algorithms are one example. For example, a 2021 Pakistan study found that when a lending algorithm was given applicants’ gender, it selected fewer women outright, as training-data bias translated directly into fewer approvals.
In short, if credit-scoring models are trained on datasets that underrepresent women or reflect decades of unequal access to formal finance, the algorithm does not automatically correct that. It replicates it. Faster. At scale. With the false legitimacy of a number.
Digital ecosystems do not have a gender by default. They have whatever gender their designers built into them. The real question is not whether digital finance can help women, it is whether they are in the room – and the data – when the products are designed.
That question matters just as much once you move from access to growth. Across every economy in the EU-OECD women’s entrepreneurship project in the Southern Mediterranean, the same gap recurs: a lack of reliable, gender-disaggregated data on credit, savings and investment at the MSME level. Tunisia is building it. Palestine has just launched a diagnostic. And Egypt and Morocco have joined the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Code to boost both data and finance for women entrepreneurs.
Until we can measure the growth gap, not just the account-opening gap, policymakers are working with only half the picture. Geography compounds the problem. Bank branches, agent networks and MSME lenders remain concentrated in capital cities, while many rural and peripheral areas still have few of either.
Fintech helps at the access layer; opening an account, receiving a transfer, building a savings habit. It does far less, so far, at the growth layer outside urban centres. Governments are taking this seriously – for instance, Jordan’s national strategy now includes workshops across every governorate, not just the capital.
The next test
I sit on both sides of this work, as a policy co-ordinator tracking national commitments, and as an accelerator trying to close the growth gap deal by deal. Both seats teach the same lesson: financial inclusion at scale is achievable when there is institutional will, evidenced now across six economies and most clearly in Egypt’s numbers.
The next test is whether we bring that same rigour to growth capital, for women who have made the first step but need the finance to go further. That test will be won or lost by the same question we started with: who is in the room when the product gets designed?
Sabrina Salama is Head of Middle East and North Africa at Seedstars, where she leads strategic partnerships and entrepreneurship initiatives across the Middle East and North Africa, working with development finance institutions, governments, corporates and ecosystem partners to mobilise resources and expand opportunities for entrepreneurs across the region.
In parallel, Sabrina serves as National Coordinator for Egypt for the OECD-EU project on Enhancing Women Entrepreneurs’ Financial Inclusion in the Southern Mediterranean, contributing to the development of Egypt’s National Action Plan and bringing together public and private sector stakeholders to strengthen women entrepreneurs’ access to finance.
With a background spanning partnerships, entrepreneurship, investment ecosystems and international development, Sabrina works at the intersection of private-sector innovation and development finance, designing and building collaborations that translate institutional priorities into tangible opportunities for entrepreneurs, particularly women and underserved founders across the region. She holds a dual Master’s degree in International Governance and Intelligence from Sciences Po Grenoble.