and underserved people across the country. This has given rise to several products, services and strategies typically designed to help a large part of the population access financial services to better their livelihoods.
To create a credit driven Nigeria, we must first and foremost improve access to finance since it is a major dependency. According to the latest report from EFINA on Access to Finance in 2018, 63.2% of Nigeria’s adult population now have access to financial services, which showed an improvement of 4.8% from 2016. While this is a good indication of progress in our financial inclusion journey, there’s still much to be done to change the country from a cash-driven economy to a credit-driven one.
For instance, India has the Aadhaar, considered to be the world’s largest biometric database registering over 1 billion people. It stores basic information of all residents and attempts to prevent identity fraud. This has been described as a strategic policy tool for financial inclusion. Today in Nigeria, with limited identification provided by the Bank Verification Number , there has been a lot of improvements around the provision of credit and this is expected to soar if more people are included and all isolated databases such as drivers’ license, international passports, SIM card registration, National Population Commission and the National Identity Management scheme are harmonized.As a country we need to respect the provider of capital and honour agreements.