Promoting Women’s Economic Empowerment Through Islamic Financial Inclusion in Lower Income Economies: Empirical Evidence from Yemen

This research aims to examine the true impact of Islamic financial inclusion (IFI) through (access, use, quality) of Islamic financial services on women’s economic empowerment (WEE) in Yemen. With the help of primary data collected from 421 respondents through non-probability sampling, the study adopted Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to analyses the relationship between Islamic financial inclusion and the economic empowerment of women. The study findings indicate that the proposed model in its final draft fits the data very well with satisfactory goodness of fit indices. Furthermore, the findings reveal a significant impact of Islamic financial inclusion, specifically the access and quality of Islamic financial services, on women’s economic empowerment in Yemen. However, there is no positive effect of the use of Islamic financial services on women’s economic empowerment in Yemen. The study highlights an earnest need for serious efforts to facilitate and ease the use of Islamic financial services among women who promote their economic empowerment. The study argues that as long as accessing Islamic financial services is influential on WEE, then using such services is supposed to contribute towards improving WEE. These results will assist policymakers, organizations concerned with women’s affairs in designing and implementing effective development strategies, plans, and policies for women’s empowerment and Islamic financial inclusion.