Nigeria’s formal financial inclusion rose to 73% in 2026, exceeding the 70% target under the National Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS), yet only 30.7% of formally included adults are financially healthy, leaving approximately 60.4 million adults financially vulnerable or merely coping.
This is according to the 2026 Access to Financial Services in Nigeria (A2F) Survey conducted by Enhancing Financial Innovation & Access (EFInA) and weighted by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
The survey covered 18,679 adults across all 36 states and the FCT, achieving 98% of its target sample of 18,950 interviews, with household listing and data collection conducted between April and June 2026.
According to the report, financial inclusion, covering both formal and informal access, rose to 79% in 2026 from 74% in 2023 and 68% in 2020. Formal financial inclusion climbed to 73%, representing about 87.2 million adults, compared with 64% in 2023 and 56% in 2020.
However, the improvement in access has not translated proportionately into financial health and resilience.
The report describes the risk of expanding financial access without corresponding improvements in financial health as “participation without progress.”
Formal credit use increased to about 10% of adults, equivalent to 11.9 million people, from 6% in 2023, although this remains substantially below the 40% NFIS target cited in the report. The composition of borrowing also changed significantly between 2023 and 2026.
This represents a reversal from 2023, when productive borrowing exceeded coping and consumption borrowing by 8.5 percentage points. By 2026, coping and consumption led productive enterprise borrowing by 6.5 percentage points, representing a swing of about 15 percentage points.
Insurance and pension coverage remain substantially behind access to banking, payments and other formal financial services. Formal insurance penetration stood at only 5.2%, equivalent to approximately 6.2 million adults, while pension participation covered about 9% of adults.
The survey also shows that inclusion gains have been uneven across geography, income, education and gender.
Trust also remains closely associated with continued use of formal financial services, as 96.9% of consumers who trusted their provider had used it within the previous 90 days, compared with 65.6% among consumers who distrusted their provider.
The survey indicates that Nigeria has made substantially more progress in bringing adults into formal accounts, payments and digital financial services than in expanding products that strengthen resilience and long-term financial security.
The survey identifies fraud control, reliability, transparent pricing, data protection and effective complaint resolution as important to meaningful and sustained financial inclusion.
The survey does not attribute the increase in coping borrowing to specific factors such as inflation, food prices, rent, school fees or medical costs. Its findings instead establish that access has expanded faster than financial health, leaving the next challenge centred on translating financial inclusion into resilience and productive economic participation.
