Challenges faced by women entrepreneurs in rural India: A mixed-method study on perception

Women entrepreneurs confront myriad issues related to economic, social, familial, market environments, and regulatory challenges in the rural Indian setting. These issues must be identified and characterized for designing policies/strategies to promote women's entrepreneurship. Accordingly, the key objective of this research is to identify and discuss challenges faced by women entrepreneurs in India, with a particular focus on rural areas of Rajasthan. Furthermore, the present research also investigates the inter-relationships between the challenges to determine the impact potential of individual challenges and issues. A mixed-method approach is adopted in the present article. Initially, a questionnaire-based survey was conducted to identify significant challenges and barriers confronted by women entrepreneurs in the selected region. A total of 120 responses were collected based on a purposive sampling procedure. The significant issues are further characterized using Interpretive Structural Modeling and MICMAC analysis. The research discloses that a lack of cooperation from male family members, weak bargaining power, self-esteem issues, psychological barriers, lack of government support, absence of adequate regulatory policies, problems in attracting customers, corruption, and other market behaviors as the major challenges faced by women entrepreneurs. The article also reports the impact potential of these challenges through a hierarchical model.