Nigeria needed to resolve the issue of gender gap if the country is to achieve the targets it set in its National Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS), the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has said.
In a report; “Assessment of Women’s Financial Inclusion in Nigeria” jointly produced by the regulatory bank and EFInA, stated that gender plays a significant role in financial inclusion in the country.
The reported noted that gender gap is larger in Nigeria than in most other countries, and whilst financial inclusion is increasing for both men and women, the gender gap is widening.
“In contrast, comparator countries in Africa such as Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda all exhibit a decreasing gender gap,” the report noted.
Read also:
“Our analysis found that the most important drivers of financial exclusion for both genders are lack of income, lack of education, and low trust in Financial Service Providers (FSPs) and that these factors also drive the gender gap.
“Because women have lower income, education, and trust levels than men, these factors also, to a large extent, explain the gender gap in overall exclusion.
“In other words, women and men with similar levels of income, education and trust in FSPs are approximately equally likely to be financially excluded yet, women typically have much lower levels of income and education than men do,” the report stated.
The report noted that income, education, and trust in FSPs are so important that the effects of other factors on exclusion—that are commonly believed to be strong and that are often the focus of interventions—are dwarfed by comparison.
Amongst others, socio-cultural drivers and gender expectations lead to women having lower levels of income and education then men. Thus, to overcome the gender gap in financial inclusion, these gendered drivers should be understood and tackled as the core binding constraints.
Women are less likely to be formally included than men, even when controlling for levels of income, education and trust.
“Given the NFIS’s ambition to increase formal inclusion as the preferred status, it is vital to look beyond absolute exclusion and to understand the gendered drivers of these differences when designing interventions.
“Three additional variables complement the dominant factors (levels of income, education and trust in FSPs) when looking at formal and informal-only inclusion.