Reframing financial literacy as empowerment: Insights from multi-case narratives of women entrepreneurs in emerging economies

In emerging economies, women entrepreneurs play a vital role in sustaining local livelihoods, yet their financial participation often remains constrained by limited access to finance, digital inequality, and sociocultural bias. This study reframes financial literacy not as a purely technical competence, but as a socially embedded process through which women construct financial meaning, enact agency, and negotiate empowerment. Adopting a qualitative multi-case design, data were collected from 66 women micro-entrepreneurs across three regions of South Sulawesi, Indonesia: Makassar, Gowa, and Pangkep. The study used narrative interviews, focus group discussions, and supporting documents, analyzed through thematic–narrative analysis supported by NVivo. The findings indicate that women construct financial literacy through iterative processes of reflection, relational learning, and adaptive negotiation with economic and digital constraints. The study introduces the Narrative–Relational–Reflective Empowerment Cycle as an empirically informed interpretive framework showing how lived experience, social relationships, and navigational adaptation interact in women's financial agency. Theoretically, the framework integrates transformative learning theory, empowerment theory, and feminist economics to extend understanding of financial literacy as a dynamic, socially embedded learning process. Practically, the findings offer insights for designing experiential, community-based financial literacy initiatives for women entrepreneurs in emerging-economy contexts.