Essays on Financial Inclusion: Barriers, Digital Currency Adoption, and Women’s Access to Identification Documents.

Using Nigeria as the case study, my dissertation investigates financial inclusion through three empirical essays, each as a distinct topic with a common focus on demand-side perspective. Paper #1: Heterogeneous Effects of Nigeria’s National Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS) on Barriers to Financial Inclusion Outcomes: Evidence from Rural Women and Other Unbanked Groups. For paper 1, five waves of EFInA A2F Survey (2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016) were used. Unlike prominent papers on barriers to financial inclusion, I introduced an exogenous shock by way of the National Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS) implementation as the paper’s major contribution. This paper limits its analysis to NFIS 1.0 (2008-2016). I assess the impact of the NFIS in Nigeria, which began in 2012, on barriers to financial inclusion, controlling for unbanked adult individuals’ demographic and socio-economic characteristics. Since all population groups were within the same policy environment, subgroup analysis was used to isolate heterogeneous effects for unbanked rural women (subgroups of interest) relative to other unbanked groups, including rural men, urban women, and urban men (benchmark groups). Barriers to financial inclusion vary across countries and importantly reflect in gender gaps and rural-urban divides. Nigeria is not an exception. This paper examined twelve (12) barriers to financial inclusion, which are described as price and non-price barriers. The findings of this paper support the need for policymakers to implement sub-national financial inclusion strategies, expand financial literary programs, and promote the adoption of digital financial services as viable channels for reducing barriers to financial inclusion. Paper #2: Consumer Payment Preferences, Gender Heterogeneity, and eNaira Adoption in Nigeria. The context for paper 2 was based on Nigeria being one of the first countries to implement a Central Bank digital currency (CBDC), known as eNaira. In this paper, I examine how are banked consumer (adults with an account at a financial institution or through a mobile money provider) preferences and gender heterogeneity associated with eNaira adoption across the dimensions of awareness, ownership, willingness, and usage in Nigeria. Notable contribution of this paper 2 is conceptualizing CBDC adoption as a staged process of awareness, ownership, willingness, and usage which aligns with existing literature on consumer payment choice that emphasize adoption as gradual diffusion (Rysman, 2010; Stavins, 2017). Furthermore, following the practice of studying the adoption and use of new payment instruments, this paper explores payment attributes of eNaira such as ease of access (ease), safety of fund (safety), speed of transactions (speed), and trust in the Central Bank (trust) (Nocciola & Zamora-P rez, 2024; Zamora-P rez, Coschignano, & Barreiro, 2022; Bijlsma, van der Cruijsen, Jonker & Reijerink, 2021). Equally, this paper examines gender heterogeneity in CBDC adoption based on consumer payment preferences, which serve as an important test whether CBDC perpetuates gender gap in digital financial inclusion. This paper’s empirical results confirm prior literature that consumers come from a very heterogeneous set of financial situations, individual prior beliefs, and these interact with payment choice in a few ways (Rysman, 2010). In addition, the results reflect how eNaira adoption may depend on complementarity rather than substitution with existing digital payment systems. Paper #3: Intersectional Identities, Identification Documents, and Women’s Financial Inclusion in Kaduna, Nigeria. In the ID documents ownership and financial inclusion literature, rarely investigated is how lack of ID documents among women impedes their ability to have or use a bank account (Tusubira & Mbabazi, 2021). Recent policy initiatives such as the World Bank’s Identification for Development (ID4D) have brought greater attention to this issue (World Bank, n/a). In contrast to the foundational work of Tusubira and Mbabazi (2021), this paper 3 focus on a subnational in Nigeria, Kaduna State, to study how ownership of foundational and functional identity documents relates to women’s financial inclusion outcomes, and how these associations differ across rural/urban, income, and education groups. My research questions and design are based on the concept of intersectionality (Govindapuram, Bhupatiraju & Sirohi, 2021; Bogan & Wolfords, 2022; Simatele & Kabange, 2022). This paper considers how female intersecting with factors such as education, income, and rural/urban is associated with access to financial services (mobile money, non-interest banking account, and savings accounts) in Kaduna, Nigeria. The results highlight substantial heterogeneity among Kaduna women. Across all the models, Kaduna women who have functional and foundational IDs are less likely to own savings, mobile money, or non-interest banking accounts compared to Kaduna men and others. This finding suggests that having an ID alone does not necessarily translate into greater financial inclusion for women.