The Enhancing Financial Innovation and Access (EFInA) has said that high cost of providing banking services, (affordability), institutional exclusion and lack of awareness are the three biggest obstacles to financial inclusion.
According to EFInA report, 60.1 million Nigerians do not have/use a bank account, 96.3 million do not have/use mobile money and 97.9 million do not have insurance.
It explained that on the digital usage in the country, it revealed that mobile money, which was thought to be useful in the financial inclusion drive, was found to only deepen rather than expand financial inclusion. The report therefore revealed that while 35.5 million Nigerians (36.6 per cent of the adult population) use bank accounts only 3.0 million adults have both mobile money and bank accounts, whereas 59.4 million (60 per cent) neither have mobile money nor bank account.
Similarly, the study showed that while 82 per cent of Nigerian adults, comprising of subsistence farmers and small business owners, receive their income in cash, 10 per cent of those adults receive their own income via mobile money or bank account, while another eight per cent did not receive any income at all.
It said that savings in the country dropped by 13.3 per cent according to the report, while savings in assets, property, and livestock had risen from 47.4 million to 54.7 million since 2016. Other decrease in respect of this indicator was that of borrowing, which went down by 2.0 per cent and remittances to one per cent. On financial access by gender, the report indicated that out of 99.6 million adults in the country, 33.5 million male adult Nigerians were financially included compared with 29.4 million female adults.
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