I4All Dialogues Opens Public Conversation on Financial Health and Resilience as Nigeria’s Next Inclusion Frontier 

Lagos, May 2026 – Earlier this month, EFInA’s Inclusion for All (I4All) initiative hosted an I4All Dialogue session, a live virtual conversation held under the campaign theme “Financial Health and Resilience for Every Home.” The session, titled Rethinking Inclusion: Financial Health and Resilience as Development Priorities, brought together financial inclusion practitioners, development economists, researchers, policy experts, and members of the public to interrogate a question that sits at the heart of Nigeria’s development agenda: how can financial inclusion deliver real outcomes for Nigerian households? 

The convening opened with a presentation by Dr Oluwatomi Eromosele, Research Lead at EFInA, titled The Financial Health Paradox: Moving from Access to Resilience in Nigeria. Drawing on EFInA’s 2023 Access to Financial Services in Nigeria (A2F) Survey, Dr Eromosele laid out the paradox at the centre of Nigeria’s inclusion story; formal financial inclusion rose from 56% to 64% between 2020 and 2023, yet in the same period, the share of financially healthy Nigerian adults fell from 28% to 16%. 84% of adults ran out of money at least once in 2023, and 78% could not raise emergency funds within a week.  

These figures established the session’s central argument: that a system expanding in reach while contracting in impact is not a system that is working, and that access to financial services, while necessary, is no longer sufficient as a measure of meaningful inclusion. “Financial health is not a product distribution problem. It is a diagnosis problem. We should move from today’s practice, which is product-led finance where customers are handed a menu of products, to diagnosis-led finance where treatment follows understanding and interventions are prescribed based on a deep, diagnostic understanding of household volatility,” Dr Eromosele told participants, pointing to a structural flaw running through how financial products reach vulnerable households. 

The presentation set the stage for a rich panel dialogue among moderator Fabia Ogunmekan, Principal Consultant at ADABA Initiatives; Funmilayo Ayeni, Country Director of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) Nigeria; and Dr Oluwatomi Eromosele, which drew out some of the session’s most compelling insights. Ayeni grounded the conversation in field evidence from some of Nigeria’s most financially fragile communities, drawing a direct and urgent line between immediate need and long-term resilience. “Resilience cannot be built without addressing immediate needs. People cannot focus on building businesses, saving money, or creating long-term stability when they are struggling to feed themselves or their families. The strongest interventions combine relief with long-term resilience building instead of treating them as separate stages,” she said. Ayeni argued that government programmes must be redesigned around outcomes rather than outputs, measuring not how much relief was distributed but whether people are becoming more stable, self-sufficient, and capable of rebuilding their lives.  

The dialogue was also opened to participants, who seized the opportunity to share their own perspectives and ask questions, surfacing organisation and community-level realities that deepened the conversation and reinforced the case for placing financial health and resilience at the centre of Nigeria’s inclusion agenda.  

Reflecting on the significance of the session, moderator Fabia Ogunmekan noted that the value of the dialogue lay not just in what was said, but in what must follow. “The I4All Dialogue on Financial Health and Resilience re-emphasised for me why these conversations matter; they bring the right people together to ideate on the real drivers of household financial fragility. The next step is ensuring the insights don’t stop merely at the level of conversation. Sustained action is what turns dialogue into lasting impact. I am delighted to have been a part of this.” 

Uchenna Enyioha, Manager, Inclusion for All, noted that the session reinforced ecosystem consensus and contributed to ongoing efforts to drive a whole-of-economy approach towards making financial health and household resilience central to financial sector policy, regulation, financial services provision, and indeed to economic discourse. He stated that the insights gathered from the session were robust enough in shaping how EFInA takes the campaign forward.” 

The I4All Dialogues is an ongoing virtual conversation series anchored on the campaign theme “Financial Health and Resilience for Every Home,” designed to shift public and stakeholder discourse from a narrow focus on financial access to a broader understanding of inclusion, one that places household financial health and resilience at the centre of Nigeria’s development agenda.