Financial Inclusion in Africa: An Overview

2012

270 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper summarizes financial inclusion across Africa. First, it provides a brief overview of the African financial sector landscape. Second, it uses the Global Financial Inclusion Indicators (Global Findex) database to characterize adults in Africa that use formal and informal financial services and identify the barriers to formal account ownership. Next, it uses World Bank Enterprise Survey data to examine how the use of financial services by small and medium enterprises in Africa compares with small and medium enterprises in other developing regions in terms of account ownership and availability of lines of credit. The authors find that less than a quarter of adults in Africa have an account with a formal financial institution and that many adults in Africa use informal methods to save and borrow. Similarly, the majority of small and medium enterprises in Africa are unbanked and access to finance is a major obstacle. Compared with other developing economies, high-growth small and medium enterprises in Africa are less likely to use formal financing, which suggests formal financial systems are not serving the needs of enterprises with growth opportunities.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78ecbd5ffe1ffbad3bae61a22f075b416815c101

Citations in the corpus

• Financial Inclusion in Africa (2015, unknown): “…Africa Africa World Saves at a Financial Institution Saves using other methods only Figure II.6: Savings Behavior in Africa (% Population)) Source: Demirgüç-Kunt and Klapper (2012). adults living in urban areas, and adults in the highest income quintile are more likely to use formal banks to save…”
• The Determinants of Financial Inclusion in Western Africa: Insights from Ghana (2013, unknown): “…Prob > chi2 = 0.0000 LR chi2(11) = 935.64 Logistic regression Number of obs = 1000 Vol.4, No.8, 2013 Source: Author’s estimations based on data from Demirgüç-Kunt and Klapper (2012) (*) dy/dx is for discrete change of dummy variable from 0 to 1 family~e .159532 .08771 1.82 0.069 -.012374 .331438…”
• Analysis of the determinants of financial inclusion in Central and West Africa (2016, unknown): “…the few recent studies conducted on financial inclusion using the World Bank Global Findex database, e.g., Allen, Carletti, et al. (2013); Allen, Demirguc-Kunt, et al. (2012); Anson et al. (2013); Demirguc-Kunt and Klapper (2012a, 2012b); Demirguc-Kunt et al. (2013); Klapper and Singer (2013).”
• Financial Inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa: Recent Trends and Determinants (2018, unknown): “Detailed information on the methodology of data collection can be found in Demirgüç-Kunt & Klapper (2012a).”
• Financial inclusion research around the world: A review (2020, unknown): “…2012), improved consumer protection reforms (Dias & McKee, 2010), building financial capability (Sherraden, 2013), reducing the distance to a bank (Demirg€uç-Kunt & Klapper, 2012), access to point-of-sale (POS) and point-oftransaction (POT) devices (Banka, 2014), mobile money (Donovan, 2012),…”