Household Electrification and Fintech Adoption Rate in Ghana

Ghana's energy and financial inclusion policies have developed along largely separate tracks, and the empirical literature on financial technology adoption in Sub-Saharan Africa has generally treated locality as an undifferentiated rural or urban indicator rather than isolating household electrification as a distinct predictor. This study examines the association between household electrification and mobile money adoption in Ghana using data from the seventh round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (N = 13,844), estimating three Bayesian logistic regression models to test whether this association exists, whether it varies by locality, and whether it varies across the household welfare distribution. Household electrification is credibly associated with mobile money adoption net of mobile phone ownership, consumption, household size, locality, and region (OR = 1.18, 95% CI: 1.04, 1.34). This association is concentrated among rural households (OR = 1.21, 95% CI: 1.05, 1.40) and is not credible among urban households (OR = 1.08, 95% CI: 0.84, 1.41). Across the welfare distribution, the association traces an inverted-U pattern, credible in the second and third welfare quintiles but not in the poorest, fourth, or wealthiest quintiles. Leave-one-out cross-validation indicates neither interaction detectably improves out-of-sample predictive accuracy relative to the baseline model, a finding reported alongside the credible-interval evidence rather than in place of it. These results suggest household electrification carries an unevenly distributed association with financial technology adoption.