We Keep Calling It 'Financial Inclusion.' For Millions of Nigerians It Still Feels Like Exclusion in a Nicer App

I have sat through a great many presentations about financial inclusion, and they all have the same slide. A big number goes up and to the right — millions of previously "unbanked" Nigerians now holding a digital account. Applause. Impact achieved. I used to nod along. Then I spent time in the markets of Onitsha and Aba, talking to the very people those slides claim to celebrate, and I stopped nodding.

Because here is what the number hides: opening an account is not the same as being included. And a great deal of what we call inclusion is, from where the trader stands, a wallet she can put money into but cannot get anything meaningful out of.

Access is not the same as usefulness

Meet Adaeze, who sells fabric in a market I won't name to protect her from the tax collectors she already distrusts. She has an account. Three, actually — every agent who signed her up counted her as a success. She receives payments into them. And that, mostly, is where the usefulness ends.

"I can collect money and I can send money," she told me. "But when I need to grow my stall — buy more stock before the festival season — nobody in these apps will lend me anything. They know my number. They know every naira that passes through. And still, no credit. What is the account for, then?"

This is the gap the celebratory metrics paper over. Real financial inclusion is not the ability to hold money. It is the ability to do things with money you don't yet have — to borrow against future sales, to smooth income across a lean season, to invest in growth. On that measure, most of Nigeria's newly "banked" millions remain firmly outside the system.

The data exists. The credit doesn't.

What makes this maddening is that the tools to fix it exist. Every transaction Adaeze makes is a data point. The platforms can see her cash flow with a granularity no traditional bank ever could. In theory, this is exactly the information needed to underwrite a small loan to a trader with no formal credit history.

In practice, that credit rarely comes. The platforms are cautious. Enforcement is hard. Default risk in the informal sector frightens balance sheets built for the salaried middle class. So the data sits there, describing a creditworthy trader the system refuses to actually extend credit to.

• She generates the data that could unlock her a loan.
• The platform harvests it.
• The loan does not materialise.

Who inclusion actually serves

Let me be blunt about a suspicion I've developed. A lot of "inclusion" serves the platforms more than the included. A trader's digital account is a source of transaction fees, a data stream, and a customer-acquisition trophy. What it too rarely is: a genuine on-ramp to the credit and services that would change her business.

We built rails to move the informal economy's money more efficiently — and then declined to give the informal economy the one thing it most needs, which is capital. We digitised the cash flow and withheld the credit.

What real inclusion would look like

I don't write this to dismiss the genuine progress. Getting tens of millions onto digital rails is a real achievement, and the payment convenience is not nothing. But we should stop mistaking the first step for the destination.

Real inclusion means the fabric seller in Onitsha can borrow against her verifiable sales at a fair rate. It means the barber in Aba can smooth a bad month without a loan shark. It means the data these platforms collect flows back to the customer as opportunity, not just upward as profit.

Until then, we should retire the self-congratulation. Adaeze put it more sharply than any analyst could. "You people say I am now 'included,'" she said, packing up her stall as the market lights came on. "Included in what? I am in the room. Nobody will give me a seat." A wallet you cannot borrow against is not a door into the economy. It is a nicer waiting room outside it.