Banking the Unbanked: Perceptions of the International Cross Border Women Entrepreneurs in Beitbridge, Zimbabwe

International cross border trading has increase recognition in Zimbabwe. Women mostly practice the phenomenon although men are taking part in the entrepreneurship. It is always believed in business management process that when one starts an enterprise, a bank account should be opened for the business. Financial inclusion has been embraced as a lynchpin for economic development. Lack of financial inclusion is regarded as a barrier impeding growth of business and hence the economy. The study aimed at documenting the perceptions of the ICBWE on financial inclusion. Literature showed that financial inclusion is a precondition for economic development and the population of a country should find it easy to be banked. In order to get rich data about the perceptions of ICBWE on financial inclusion a case study design was used. A purposive sample was drawn from the population of study. The informants were subjected to semi-structured interviews. The study concluded that although the ICBWE have significantly high educational qualifications that can help them understand and appreciate financial inclusion they had reservations in banking their money with the formal financial system. Members of ICBWE are no longer trusting banking, fear to bank and find no money in the banks next day when they want cash to do their businesses and the minimum withdrawal amounts have affected them and decided not to deposit their money with any financial institutions. Therefore it was recommended that more imports of cash should be done by the government to easy the shortage of cash in the short term. In the long term there is need to develop, lucrative polices aiming at harnessing all the cash from the informal sector like the ICBWE and channelled into the formal banking system through agreement on cash withdrawal on the basis of ability to bank.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.