Beyond Access: Turning Financial Inclusion into Financial Resilience in Nigeria
Reviewing the 2025 Global Findex Through A2F Lens
About the Findex Report
The Global Findex Survey, conducted by the World Bank every three years, is the world’s largest dataset on how adults save, borrow, make payments, and manage financial risks. Covering 140+ countries, it offers cross-country comparability that helps Nigeria see not just where we stand locally, but how we measure globally—benchmarking progress and identifying areas of weakness.
The 2025 Global Findex Report places Nigeria among the world’s most consequential financial inclusion markets, both for its progress and for the stubborn gaps that continue to exclude millions.
Viewed against Nigeria’s Access to Financial Services in Nigeria (A2F) 2023 survey, the Findex directionally signals consistent progress while corroborating A2F’s central message: national averages conceal deep structural and subnational gaps as well as inequalities. With 84% of adults owning a mobile phone, 63% holding an account, and 54% making digital payments, progress is clear. But beneath these numbers, deep gaps remain. Only 43% of Nigerians save formally, and just 9% borrow from formal sources. Compared to peers—Kenya and Mauritius (90% account ownership) and Ghana and South Africa (81%)—Nigeria lags significantly. In addition, though digital use in Nigeria is growing, gender and capability gaps threaten to limit its impact. The Findex underscores a persistent gendered digital divide also reported in the A2F survey: men are more likely to own smartphones, while most women rely on basic phones or devices not registered in their own names. This limits women’s ability to meet KYC requirements, build digital identities, and fully access digital financial services. All these point to layered inequalities—both demographic and systemic—that limit meaningful inclusion. Without targeted interventions, DFS risks widening the gender gap rather than closing it.
Where Access Stops, exclusion persists, and Financial Health is constrained.
The combined evidence from the Findex report, which mirrors findings from the A2F 2023 report about the gaps that matter, is unambiguous. Findings from both Findex 2024 and A2F 2023 point to four persistent barriers: insufficient money, which is cited as the dominant reason for not owning an account. These are:
- Proximity and Reliability—Nearly half (47%) of the unbanked cite distance to financial institutions. The answer is not just more accounts but denser, better-supervised agent networks, reliable cash-in/cash-out, and offline-capable tools, especially in states where the A2F records thin infrastructure.
- Trust and Recourse—A quarter of the unbanked distrust financial institutions, citing fraud, opaque fees, and failed transactions. Weak consumer protection and redress systems erode confidence.
- Affordability—22% of the unbanked cite cost as the barrier. High fees and product pricing deter low-income users from deeper engagement.
- Capability and Relevance – Low education and financial capability limit uptake. Women, informal workers, and micro-enterprises often find that products do not address their real needs—cash flow, health, agriculture, or risk management.
Even where access exists, financial resilience remains weak—a central finding from the Findex 2025 that echoes the A2F 2023 survey. Nigerians are noted as less able to withstand shocks than citizens in several lower-income countries. This undermines the promise of financial inclusion.
The Continued Role of the A2F
While Findex offers indispensable global benchmarking, it cannot reveal Nigeria’s subnational realities or tell where, precisely, to steer to close the subsisting gaps, which are not evenly distributed. The A2F survey—Nigeria’s most detailed, nationally representative financial inclusion dataset—fills this gap by mapping disparities at the level where policy is implemented. It captures not only the broad trends but state-by-state differences, as well as gender, income, occupational, and residential divides, where targeted interventions can have the most impact.
Conclusion and Call to Action
The story of financial inclusion in Nigeria is one of progress, but also unfinished business. Account ownership is rising, and we can celebrate the expansion of digital payments, but we must also confront the sobering reality that most Nigerians still cannot weather a financial shock. Credit and insurance access are too limited, and trust in the system remains low. The gains of access will be undermined if use, relevance, and financial health do not follow.
As EFInA embarks on A2F 2025, the goal must be to measure meaningful inclusion—that is, financial services that improve resilience, opportunity, and well-being. To accelerate inclusion that is characterized by impact, this requires collaboration among policymakers, regulators, FSPs, donors, and civil society to:
- Expand reliable agent networks to where they are needed and offline tools.
- Strengthen consumer protection and dispute resolution.
- Ensure affordable, relevant products that solve real problems.
- Address gender and geographic divides with tailored approaches.
A financially healthy Nigeria is not just a statistic—it is a strategy for shared prosperity. The challenge before us is to turn access into resilience.
