Financing Women’s Farming Entrepreneurship: The Role of Agricultural Lending, Land Access, and Regional Heterogeneity in Kazakhstan

Unequal access to agricultural resources remains a major obstacle to women’s entrepreneurship and inclusive rural development in Central Asia, yet empirical evidence on how agricultural lending relates to women’s farming entrepreneurship is limited. This study examines the relationship between institutional agricultural lending and the number of women-led farms in 20 regions of Kazakhstan in 2015–2024. Pooled ordinary least squares, two-way fixed effects, the between estimator and the Mundlak regression are used to separate differences between regions from changes within regions over time; k-means clustering and a Random Forest model are supplementary methods. The pooled model shows a positive and statistically significant association between lending and women-led farms. With region and year fixed effects, the estimated association becomes smaller and is not statistically significant, although a within-region relationship cannot be ruled out. The official indicator of women granted agricultural land varies widely across regions. Cluster analysis identifies two groups of regions that differ in the level and growth of women-led farms, while the Random Forest model shows limited predictive ability. The study provides regional panel evidence from Kazakhstan and highlights the importance of regional context, while incomplete metadata limit conclusions about women’s access to land.