Page 147 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 1

STS422 Damola Owalade

Innovative approaches in measuring financial
inclusion - Linking survey and administrative
data
Damola Owalade
Insight2Impact facility
1
Abstract
Demand-side surveys are particularly popular in developing and emerging
markets, where financial inclusion data is not readily available on a large
portion of the adult population. This information plays a critical role in
developing financial inclusion strategies, which aims to bring financially
excluded adults into the formal financial system. This paper documents the
data quality implications of linking administrative data with survey data to
explain the use of digital financial services in Nigeria and credit behaviour in
Zimbabwe. Merging demand side surveys with administrative data provides
an opportunity to utilise a customer-centric approach in assessing the impact
of financial inclusion. This methodology has challenges which include access
to administrative data, the quality of the administrative data and the ability to
recruit respondents to participate in survey that allows the construction of
additional information such as demographics and behavioural attributes of
customers.

Keywords
Financial Inclusion; Linked data; Financial Inclusion Measurement; Customer-
centric

1. Introduction
The emphasis on using data for decision-making in financial inclusion (FI)
has resulted in rapid growth in the number of demand-side surveys
implemented globally (For example, FinScope, FinDex, FinAccess). Demand-
side surveys are particularly popular in developing and emerging markets,
where financial inclusion data is not currently available on a large portion of
the adult population. This information plays a critical role in informing and
measuring financial inclusion strategies, which aims to bring financially
excluded adults into the formal financial system.
Financial inclusion is typically measured along the domains of access
(access to financial touch points), uptake (take up of a financial product), usage
(usage of products) and quality of services (value proposition to customers).
Access is adequately captured when there is high quality location or spatial
data on financial access points (e.g. agent location) which can be overlaid with

1 Launched in 2015, i2i is jointly hosted by Cenfri and FinMark Trust and is funded by the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation in partnership with The MasterCard Foundation.

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