Rethinking Financial Inclusion Success: Why Climate Resilience Must Be a Core Metric in Nigeria
By Babjide Daini, MEL Manager, EFInA
Nigeria’s financial inclusion story is often told as one of steady progress. More people have bank accounts, digital payments are expanding, and access is improving. By conventional measures, the system appears to be working. But this narrative rests on a fragile assumption: that access to financial services is the same as financial security. In a country where floods, drought, and price shocks routinely disrupt livelihoods, that assumption no longer holds. A household can be financially included on paper and financially devastated in reality.
I say this not only as someone working within the financial inclusion space, but as someone whose background spans public health, nutrition, and the evaluation of interventions among vulnerable populations, particularly women, youth, and rural, agriculture-dependent communities. Across these experiences, I have seen first-hand how resilience plays out at multiple levels, not as an abstract concept but as something that becomes visible when programmes deliberately set out to measure it. In evaluating interventions across the agricultural value chain and youth-focused livelihoods programmes, the focus is rarely limited to whether individuals have access to opportunities or services; it extends to whether they achieve dignified and productive work, whether incomes are stable, and whether households are able to withstand and recover from shocks over time. It is through this lens that clear differences begin to emerge. At the individual level, some people are able to make decisions that protect their well-being in times of stress. At the household level, this translates into the ability to stabilise consumption, preserve assets, and absorb shocks. At the community level, these differences compound, shaping whether communities can collectively withstand and recover from disruption. In contrast, despite having accounts or participating in financial systems, others are forced into immediate and often damaging coping strategies such as selling productive assets, reducing food intake, or pulling children out of school. What distinguishes these groups is not simply whether they have access to financial services, but whether that access translates into sustained, productive, and shock-responsive outcomes. The difference, in essence, is not access; it is resilience.
This points to an uncomfortable gap at the heart of Nigeria’s financial inclusion agenda. We are measuring access and, increasingly, usage, but not resilience. Globally, the tools used to track progress are beginning to evolve, yet important limitations remain. The Global Findex Database, widely regarded as the gold standard, now extends beyond access to include elements of financial health, such as whether individuals can access emergency funds, rely on remittances, or cope after experiencing a shock. While this represents important progress, the framing of resilience remains largely generic. It tells us whether people can find money in a crisis, but not whether they are structurally positioned to withstand the types of shocks that define their everyday economic reality, particularly in contexts where livelihoods are closely tied to climate variability and seasonal income patterns.
In Nigeria, especially across rural and northern regions, this distinction is critical. Livelihoods are deeply embedded in agriculture, where income is seasonal, shocks are frequent, and recovery is uncertain. In such settings, resilience cannot be reduced to the ability to mobilise emergency funds; it must be understood in terms of whether financial systems are designed around cycles of risk, supporting households to anticipate, absorb, and recover from disruptions such as crop failure, flooding, and sudden price changes. National data reflects a similar trajectory. Nigeria’s Access to Finance surveys, led by EFInA, have made important strides in tracking not just access but how people use financial services. The data shows clear progress in areas such as payments and savings, with over half of adults now using formal channels for payments and a growing share actively saving. Yet usage remains uneven and shallow in the areas that matter most for managing risk, with only about 6% of adults accessing formal credit, roughly 3% covered by insurance, and around 8% participating in pensions. These patterns reveal that the financial tools most critical for absorbing shocks remain the least accessible or least used, particularly among the populations most exposed to those shocks.
This gap becomes even more consequential when viewed against the backdrop of increasing climate stress. Across rural and peri-urban Nigeria, flooding and erratic rainfall are disrupting agricultural cycles, eroding incomes, and driving food price volatility. According to the World Bank, climate change could push tens of millions of people into poverty globally by 2030, with countries like Nigeria among the most vulnerable. The impact of these shocks extends far beyond immediate income loss, often triggering a chain reaction that includes reduced food consumption, heightened malnutrition risk, disruptions to education, and the distress sale of productive assets that undermine future earning potential. At the individual, household, and community levels, these effects compound over time, creating cycles of vulnerability that are difficult to reverse and that existing financial inclusion metrics fail to capture.
The misalignment becomes particularly stark when we consider who financial inclusion efforts are meant to reach. Nigeria’s most financially excluded and marginally included populations are disproportionately rural and dependent on agriculture, and these same populations are the most exposed to climate variability. Yet the metrics used to track inclusion rarely reflect the risks that define their economic reality, effectively resulting in a system that is designed and evaluated for stability in an environment characterised by volatility. While other countries are beginning to move toward more climate-responsive approaches, such as index-based agricultural insurance in Kenya, which has demonstrated the ability to cushion farmers against rainfall shocks and reduce distress sales during drought periods, or climate-adaptive financial products in Bangladesh that align savings and credit with seasonal income patterns. These examples show that aligning financial services with climate risk is not only possible but already underway in comparable contexts. What distinguishes these approaches is not just product innovation, but the recognition that resilience must be an explicit outcome of financial inclusion efforts. Nigeria’s measurement framework, however, has yet to fully incorporate these realities in a way that shifts incentives and priorities.
The challenge, therefore, is not a lack of innovation but a definition of success that has not kept pace with the conditions people face. As long as financial inclusion is assessed primarily through access and usage, there will be limited incentive to prioritise resilience, even though resilience is what ultimately determines whether financial inclusion delivers meaningful impact. A household that can access finance but cannot survive a climate shock cannot be considered financially included in any meaningful sense. If Nigeria is to build a financial system that supports genuine economic stability, climate resilience must move from the margins to the centre of how inclusion is defined, measured, and pursued, with metrics that capture preparedness, recovery capacity, and the ability to maintain well-being in the face of disruption. In a climate-exposed economy, the true test of financial inclusion is not whether people can enter the system, but whether the system can hold when everything else gives way.
About the writer
Babajide Daini is the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Manager at EFInA, with over a decade of experience in evidence-based research and evaluation across Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa. He is passionate about using data to drive impact for the most vulnerable populations.
