The Female Financial Inclusion and the Sustainable Development in MENA Countries

In this paper we try to examine the effect of Microfinance on the sustainable development in a group of Middle East and North Africa countries (MENA). Can we consider that Microcredits are performing instrument for the sustainable development in MENA countries? To answer this question we chose a period from 1990 to 2018 and a sample of 10 MEN countries was selected. We have approximated sustainable development supported by the endogenous variable corresponds to the net adjustment of sustainable development (GS). Exogenous variables are: Active female borrowers (AFB), Labor Force female (LFF), the female to male labor force ratio, Gender parity index (GPI), GINI Index (GINI) and the GDP deflator. In the empirical analysis, we examined the linear fit of this long-term relationship within an error correction (ECM) model. We founded that 67% of sustainable development imbalance will be corrected by micro-financial institutions as the speed of adjustment brings this imbalance back to a stable state in the long term. Subsequently, we adopted the GMM method to determine the dynamics of sustainable development. Our results showed that participation rate of men in the labor force has a negligible and not significant influence on sustainable development and this can refer to their limit.

pillage of nature and the deviations of scientific progress can be eliminated from our societies. On the one hand, sustainable development represents a new opportunity for the quality of economic growth and how its benefits are distributed to all strata of society, not just a process of economic expansion, which does not prevent the increase in income disparities between individuals and groups, whether between the North and the South or within the developing countries themselves. Sustainable development allows risk assessment, awareness-raising and guidance of political action at local, regional and international levels. Poverty eradication or at least poverty reduction is a big challenge.
Women entrepreneurs are key contributors to private enterprise development, job creation and economic growth worldwide. As underlined by the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, there is a strong correlation between gender equality and a country's prosperity and economic competitiveness (Haussman et al., 2010). It is thus important to mainstream women in broader enterprise support policies and programmes such as women's enterprise centers, coaching and mentoring programmes and financing initiatives (OECD

2019).
Women entrepreneurs in the MENA region already have great leadership potential.
One in three startups in MENA countries is headed by women. However, the funding they receive is 23% less than that received by men. In addition, women make up only 21% of the MENA region's labor force, significantly lower than in all other regions with a similar level of economic development (World Bank 2019). Some studies show that there are many opportunities offered and created by women entrepreneurs and leaders in the MENA region (OECD 2019). However, women in the MENA region who are highly educated stay at home and their labor force participation rate is one of the lowest in the world. For example, up to 75% of men and at least 50% of women in Egypt, Lebanon, the Gaza and Morocco believe that the most important role a woman plays is to stay home (UN Women, 2020). Women in the MENA region suffer from a lack of access to microcredit and support for long-term finance when setting up businesses. They also suffer from the lack of a more family regulatory framework in the MENA region (World Bank 2018). In addition, women are under pressure to work in a field dominated by men.
In most MENA countries, 48% of women do not own mobile phones, which is 8% less than men. This gap varies from one country to another in the MENA region: it is almost zero in Egypt but it reaches around 21% in Jordan. Women in the MENA region face the same constraints when it comes to ownership and productive use of mobile phone devices. The cost, quality and coverage of the network were considered as the barriers that prevent women from using new technologies. For example, in Egypt, 12% of women do not use the internet because they said internet services are inappropriate for them. Also, more than 8% of women do not choose these services because they fear disapproval from friends or family.
Microcredit programs intended for women could represent an opportunity for MENA countries to respond to these structural difficulties faced by women in the region. Several MENA governments have taken significant initiatives to launch programs to mainstream a long-term gender perspective. This is important for fostering the economic empowerment of women and for making the region's economies thrive in the short and long term. According to the World Bank, achieving income equalization for women and men in the MENA region could represent a regional gain of $ 3.1 trillion (World Bank, 2018). It is in this context that we try to study the impact of the economic inclusion of women through micro-credit programs on the sustainable development (SD) in the MENA region. In our work we have adopted the following plan: section two informs us about the literature review. Section three describes the data and outlines the empirical methodology. Section fourth presents the empirical results. Section five provides conclusion.

Literature review
A scan of the literature, we find that most researchers (Milne and  sustainability as an efficient and equitable distribution of wealth between generations while operating social and economic activities within the boundaries of a limited ecosystem. In contrast, Ben-Eli (2015) considers sustainability as a balanced and dynamic mechanism in the system of interaction between populations and the capacity of their environment for people to develop to express their full capabilities without adversely affecting the resilience of the environment on which it depends. With this premise, sustainability continues to focus on human activities and its ability to meet human needs and desires without exhausting or exhausting the productive resources available to it. Therefore, it raises ideas about how people should live their economic and social lives based on the environmental resources available for human development. Sustainable development is becoming essential in development strategies. If we take it literally, SD could simply translate into development that could continue indefinitely or over a specified period (Lele, 1991). From a structural point of view, the concept of SD could be broken down into two terms "sustainable" and "development".
We can also use these two words united to form the concept of sustainable development, i.e. "sustainable" and "development", were defined differently, the sustainable development (SD) was seen from different angles, resulting in a large number of definitions of the concept.
Although there are many definitions for sustainable development, the most common definition of this concept is the one proposed by Schaefer & Crane, (2005). They state that sustainable development should encompass the concepts of equity, empowerment, accessibility, participation, and the stability of institutional qualities. The concept shows that people are the center of interest because development interests them.
Social point sustainability is considered to be a system of social organization that helps reduce poverty (Littig and Grießler, 2005). However, according to another point of view "social sustainability" is related to the link between social conditions such as poverty and reduced environmental qualities (Farazmand, 2016). In this regard, the theory of sustainability from a social point of view assumes that poverty alleviation should not lead to unjustified environmental destruction or economic crises. The crucial objective of social sustainability is to limit the poverty of populations (Scopelliti et al., 2018). In Saith's (2006) view, at the social level, sustainability requires promoting human development and cultural identities of societies to help achieve meaningful life, relying on appropriate health care, gender equality education and stability around the world. Littig and Grießler, (2005) consider that social sustainability is difficult to achieve because the social dimension seems complicated. The dynamics in the social system could not be easily estimated in comparison with environmental and economic systems where flows and cycles can be easily observed, (Saner, Yiu, Nguyen, 2019). Everest-Phillips (2014), shows that social sustainability is not limited to meet the needs of the current population. It tends to create favorable conditions that allow everyone to be able to meet their needs. Any measure that hinders this capacity is a barrier and should be overcome in a way that enables people to move towards social sustainability. Understanding the dynamics and emergence of societies is considered a prerequisite for social sustainability (Lv, 2018). According to Gray, R. (2013), social sustainability also touches on many areas such as gender inequalities, regional disparities, public participation and the rule of law, which are in favor of peace and social stability.
Microfinance is now recognized as an effective and financially sustainable tool for reducing poverty, especially in developing countries but also for the poor in the developed world. The Microcredit Summit campaign just announced that 30.6 million poor families worldwide now have access to small loans, and that the number covered has increased by 40 percent over the past year. This means that there is now an opportunity to significantly reduce poverty around the world. Microfinance is not a panacea for eradicating poverty in the world, as not all poor families can benefit from it. Those who do not have a member who is able to participate in income-generating activities cannot help them out of poverty through a loan. Many other poor families do not have the entrepreneurial capacity and/or self-discipline required to make good use of microcredit. But experience from around the world now shows that large numbers of poor women being provided with microfinance services are using the opportunity to reduce their poverty and that of their families.
Microfinance demonstrates a new way of development intervention, a method that displaces governments as central actors and transforms into market mechanisms for service delivery. However, most observers today see microfinance as a useful financial service rather than a transformative social and economic intervention (Mosman, 2015). Others reacted to high expectations, dismissing microfinance as a failed failure, a neoliberal invention that attracted donors but failed to deliver the services that helped truly poor communities. The question we try to study is does the microfinance addressed to women in Mena countries is capable to contribute to the sustainable development?

Empirical validation
In order to study the impact of the participation of women in the MENA region on sustainable development, we used an annual database which is extracted from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.Our sample consists mainly of ten countries in the MENA region during a study period from 1990 to 2018.Our study covers ten MENA countries: Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan, Palestine, Tunisia, Syria and Yemen. We approximated the endogenous variable (the sustainable development) by the net adjustment of the sustainable development which is withdrawn from the World Bank. We will use several explanatory variables which are:   Inflation: we used the GDP deflator calculated by the ratio of nominal to real GDP.

Descriptive statistics
We analyze the quality of precision, linear fit to the mean, symmetry, kurtosis and normality of explanatory and endogenous variables by indicators of position, dispersion and shape. The table below presents the descriptive statistics that correspond to these variables.

Table 1. Descriptive statistics
We performed a logarithmic transformation of all endogenous and exogenous variables. We can see from this table that the standard deviations are very low for all these variables.So we can assume that there is a good quality of linear fit for each variable with respect to the mean.The means are positive for these variables except for the gender parity index (GPI).The skewnesses tend towards zero, these mean that these variables have symmetrical information.
On the other hand, the statistics for Kurtosis are less than 3 and the flattening is different from the abscissa axis. Jarque-Bera statistics are significant at the 1% risk threshold since these statistics are greater than the critical chi-square value at 2 degrees of freedom. Hence, these variables do not follow the Normal law.

Correlation relations
We study the dependence between the explanatory variables and the endogenous variable of sustainable development.Our study period spans 29 years (from 1990 to 2018). Our sample is made up of the ten MENA countries.We will present the matrix of the coefficients of the total correlations in order to detect the existence or the absence of the Multicoloneality problem.
LGS institutions has negative impacts on the following two variables: the female workforce and the ratio between the women &men in the labor force.The female labor force is positively correlated with the ratio between the rate of female participation in the labor force and the rate of male participation in the labor force. On the other hand, the ratio of active women to the total active population has a negative impact on the women contracting microcredits. This ratio is also, negatively correlated with the gender parity index (GPI) and the income inequality index (GINI   The Within Rho-stat, pp-stat and v-stat statistics are lower than the tabulated value of the reduced centered normal distribution and according to these three statistics, we can accept the Co-integration relation because the residuals are stationary in level. On the other hand, the Adf statistic of Within is greater than the critical value of the reduced centered normal distribution, which leads us to reject the Co-integration relation. The three statistics Between Rho-stat, pp-stat and Adf-stat are below the critical value at the risk threshold of 5% of the reduced centered normal distribution, which allows us to accept the Co-integration relationship. Generally speaking, we accept the Co-integration relationship which links the endogenous variable (sustainable development) according to the explanatory variables. We will use the Fully-Modified technique to estimate the intra-country relations of Co-

Table 5. Relationship of intra-country co-integration of MENA
From this table, we can notice that the degree of elasticity of the sustainable development indicator (SD) in relation to the workforce of women who have contracted microloans from microfinance institutions is very low and not significant. Hence, this microcredit variable has no effect on economic growth and poverty reduction.The ratio of the female labor force participation rate divided by the male labor force participation rate has a negligible and insignificant influence on sustainable development. Also, the endogenous variable of sustainable development is insensitive to girls' education.However, the level of primary and secondary education is significant. The variable of income inequalities (GINI) shows a significant and negative impact on the endogenous variable of sustainable development (SD). We also find that the inflation rate has no impact on the sustainable development variable (SD) because the latter is considered a long-term variable that could be influenced by purely real and non-monetary indicators.We will study the linear fit of this long-term relationship in an error correction model (ECM). This model (ECM) presents a deterministic equilibrium where all the explanatory and endogenous variables are stationary in the first differences. This same model also shows a long-term equilibrium where all these same variables are stationary through the linear combination in the case where the residuals are stationary in level. Linear adjustment could be made relative to equilibrium when the coefficient of the lagged long-term variable has a negative and statistically significant sign.
We opt for the estimation of this model (ECM) by adopting the fully modified procedure. The LGPIit 0.29 2.75 LGINIit -1.10 -2.27 LINFit 0.34 0.70

Table 6. Estimation of the ECM model
The results of the estimation of the ECM model through the Fully-Modified procedure allow us to see that the signs of the coefficients are expected and statistically significant. We can also retain that the short-term equilibrium is ensured by stationary variables in the first differences. This short-term equilibrium relationship has coefficients with expected signs which are statistically significant. Regarding the long-term equilibrium relationship, the adjustment is made by a coefficient of residuals shifted by a single period with a negative sign and statistically significant. This shows that almost 67% of the imbalance observed in sustainable development will be corrected by micro-loans granted to women in the MENA region. This could be explained by the speed of the adjustment which could bring this imbalance back to a partially stable state over the long period. We will study the linear dynamics of sustainable development as a function of the explanatory variables of microcredits and macroeconomics. The dynamic model takes the following linear form: that when the number of countries is small (which is true in our case), the asymptotic standard deviations for the two-step estimator are biased downward. In contrast, the one-step estimator is asymptotically inefficient with respect to the two-step one even when the error terms are homoscedastic. Arellano and Bond (1991) showed that their two-step estimators could lead to biased results in the case of a small sample size. These researchers therefore recommended adopting a one-step estimator. The table below shows the results of these two types of estimates with robust standard deviations for the duplicateand single-step estimation. test and m2 statistic validate the absence of autocorrelation problems for the one and two step Arellano and Bond estimation procedure.

Interpretation of the results
Although women in the MENA region have been involved in business initiatives and startups, their role and potential have notparadoxically been empirically verified in our work. This negative impact of the role of women's activities on sustainable development in the MENA region could be explained in large part by several factors such as the school enrollment rate and the amplification of women's domestic work. The MENA region has made significant progress in reducing the gap between women and men in primary and secondary education (3% and 5%) in favor of men and higher (1%) in favor of women, respectively (UNESCO, 2019). However, women's academic performance is likely to be impacted. Dropping out of school disproportionately affects girls, who can be monopolized by additional burdens related to domestic work . The MENA region has been ranked as the second largest in the world in the area of unpaid domestic work that weighs on women (L'OBS / AFP, 2020).
According to recent surveys, the majority of men in the MENA region consider that the primary role of women is to take care of the household, up to 87% and 72% of men in Egypt and Morocco respectively (UN Women, 2020). showed that 35% of households that are headed by women do not have Internet access compared to 56% of households that are headed by men (UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, 2020).
In this context, this digital divide could prevent women in the region from fully benefiting from these technologies (Vegas, 2020). Enabling women to acquire the skills and tools necessary for their activity constitutes a real opportunity for the development of women's businesses mobilizing technologies in the MENA region. Almost 62% of women in the region are in informal, undeclared employment without social protection (ILO, 2018).About 27% of women in the MENA region work in agriculture. In Tunisia, 70% of the agricultural workforce is women. As agricultural producers, women in rural areas often face very heavy and unpaid workloads (OECD, forthcoming).In the largest refugee camp in Jordan one in five households is headed by a woman, but only 5-10% of women work (Ritchie, 2017),   , 2017). In some MENA countries, it has been found that even when women take out loans, these are often used by their husbands (UN Women, 2020). This weakness in access to financial services largely justifies the negative impact of microloans in MENA countries. Violence against women in the MENA region may partly explain the negative impact of micro-lending programs.Women living in rural areas, refugees, domestic workers and those in conflict-affected areas are more likely to be exposed to violence due to their complicated financial situation  Due to the existence of structural barriers linked to the persistence of gender stereotypes and unequal economic opportunities in the MENA region, women's activities, jobs and income are more vulnerable. These risks are much greater for some informal workers who lack sufficient social protection and job and income security. This is the case with unpaid domestic workers, small traders and agricultural workers, among whom women are overrepresented in the MENA region. These constraints are amplified by social norms that limit women's empowerment and their position in the economic and social life of the MENA region (OECD, 2020). It is estimated that the participation of women in the formal labor market in the MENA region is 20% which is already the lowest in the world (ILO, 2019). The MENA region has the highest youth unemployment rate (aged 15 to 24) in the world, at 42.8% for young women (World Bank, 2019). Although in our empirical work we have, paradoxically, found that microcredits intended for women in the MENA region do not lead to a positive impact on sustainable development, this does not prevent the importance of these micro loans in the economic recovery in the region. Governments should adopt the necessary support mechanisms to support these initiatives enabling women to become fully involved in economic recovery. Reflections on the impact of gender equality and women's empowerment through micro-credit should also include a long-term perspective on how to move closer to the Sustainable Development Goals.
Technologies can help reach groups, excluded from funding, through the introduction of digital wallets and mobile money transfer apps. They also facilitate technical support and training for entrepreneurs, and provide opportunities for SMEs, particularly those led by women. The digital gender divide must be taken into account in order to ensure that technologies are suitable for vulnerable individuals.There is a need to improve the access of women and girls to technology in the MENA region by specifically targeting training for women in order to strengthen their skills in digital technologies.These countries should provide consultancy services and digital platform development to support women-led businesses. Particular attention should be paid to educational programs that target women entrepreneurs under the Financial Inclusion Initiative. It will also be important to ensure that reforms to support economic recovery are based on careful gender analysis. An equitable presence of women in decision-making and leadership is critical to spur economic, sustainable and inclusive recovery.