Moroccan women run 15.6% of firms but receive 10.8% of loans

By Daniel Okafor

Women ran 60,363 of Morocco’s 388,446 companies in 2024—15.6%—while women-led businesses received only 10.8% of total lending, according to a Ministry of Economy and Finance report published among the documents accompanying Morocco’s 2027 Finance Bill.

Ownership is not capital. For a woman founder, the ministry’s figures leave a 4.8-percentage-point gap between the 15.6% share of companies run by women and the 10.8% share of lending received by women-led businesses. “Access to finance remains a major challenge for women entrepreneurs,” the report says. The figures do not explain causes, but they show the scale of the constraint on expansion.

What does the ownership gap show?

The ministry found that 12.3% of Moroccan companies had at least one woman owner, a measure broader than counting firms run by women because it includes women who co-own a company. It sits far below 40.3% across OECD countries and 30.1% in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the report.

The ministry’s other comparators were closer: 13.6% for Arab countries and 15.8% for Turkey. For an entrepreneur benchmarking her position, that comparison places Morocco nearer those figures than the OECD average.

Where are women most represented, and does company age matter?

The ministry’s sector breakdown shows women’s strongest company presence in services, at markedly different levels:

• Other service activities: women ran 45% of companies.
• Health and social work: women ran 43.1% of companies.
• Education: women ran 30.2% of companies.
• Financial, scientific and technical activities: women ran around 24% of companies.

These figures show where women’s entrepreneurship is most visible, not that service firms receive proportionate credit. The report did not break the 10.8% lending share down by sector.

The ministry also found a stronger female presence among newer companies:

• Less than two years old: women ran 17.8% of companies.
• Two to five years old: women ran 16.6% of companies.
• More than 10 years old: women ran 12.7% of companies.

The first two rates exceed the 15.6% national company share, while the over-10-year rate trails it. For a woman founder, newer peer groups contain more women-run businesses; the report does not break lending down by company age.

What does the labor market show?

At national level, women’s labor-force participation—the share working or actively seeking work—fell from 30.4% in 1999 to 19% in 2025. Female unemployment rose from 12.8% in 2000 to 20.5% in 2025, the ministry reported.

Education marks a sharp divide within that market. In 2025, 45.4% of women with higher education were active in the labor force, compared with 14.4% of women without qualifications, according to the ministry.

For an individual jobseeker, that 31-point divide makes higher education a major marker of labor-market engagement, although the report does not identify the occupations behind the difference.

Where are rural women losing ground?

The share of rural women active in the labor market fell from 36.9% in 2014 to 18.2% in 2025, the ministry found. In cities, it rose slightly from 17.8% to 19.4% over the same period.

Consequently, the rural-urban participation gap narrowed from 19.1 percentage points to 1.2 points, but not through rural gains. Rural participation dropped 18.7 points while the city rate gained 1.6. For jobseekers, near convergence reflects a deteriorating rural market, not a rural catch-up.

The next available ministry figures will show whether women-led firms’ 10.8% lending share rises toward their 15.6% company-ownership share, while national female labor-force participation moves above 19% and rural participation rebounds from 18.2%.