What is the big deal about having a bank account?
Your bank account is one of the most important innovations in history. At a basic level, it allows you to track and store your money without living with a lump in your mattress, but it does even more: a bank account ought to be a gateway to a raft of financial services like payments, loans, remittances, and insurance.
No nation in the world can build sustainable wealth until most of its citizens can access and afford these services. That is why financial inclusion is such a big deal. It is not just a “nice-to-have”; it is a necessary condition (and consequence) of sustainable development.
Knowing this, most developing countries set financial inclusion targets and implement related policies. For example, Nigeria initially targeted a national inclusion rate of 80% by 2020.
What does that 80% target mean, though?
Most countries use
