Deconstructing involuntary financial exclusion: a focus on African SMEs
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) struggle to obtain credit when credit ratings and collateral are used as criteria to assess their credit applications. In the context of Africa, the financial markets have gaping institutional voids, and contextual insights into SMEs’ experiences remain underdeveloped. Drawing on the stakeholder-agency theory of debt financing, this paper advances the scholarly conversation by theorising about how collateral security, collateral security value and the gender of SME owners lead to the involuntary financial exclusion of many manufacturing businesses in Africa. Analysis of the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) dataset reveals that collateral security and collateral security value, together with gender biases in Africa’s financial markets, reduce credit access potential. Consequently, SMEs’ perceptions of the likelihood of obtaining credit for business purposes are reduced. Empirical results for 13,783 SMEs across 41 African countries indicate that the motivations to apply for credit also diminish. These observations contribute to entrepreneurial financing and SME research.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it