Female entrepreneurship in rural areas between challenges and opportunities: What self-efficacy?

Abstract

This article analyzes the role of self-efficacy in the entrepreneurial performance of women in rural areas, mobilizing Bandura’s (1986) perspective and articulating it with complementary levers: skills, observation of models, mastery experiences, relational support, and motivational regulation. The study is based on a survey conducted in the Marrakech-Safi region with 259 women entrepreneurs, collected through snowball sampling, and on an ordered Logit model explaining a perceived performance measured on a Likert scale. Specification, normality, heteroscedasticity, and collinearity tests attest to the robustness of the estimations. The results show that performance is mainly associated with psychological and social resources (self-confidence, skills, role models, community and institutional support, emotional regulation), while the accumulation of past experiences and the size of the activity do not appear decisive in this context. Education plays a favorable role, whereas age may slow perceived progress. The main contribution of the article is twofold: theoretically, it integrates a behavioral reading of rural female entrepreneurship; empirically, it offers contextualized evidence for Morocco.