Gallup’s 2014 Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) database, which measures the extent of account penetration, the use of mobile money payments and saving and borrowing practices in more than 140 countries, reveals the impact of mobile money usage in Africa.
“Accounts at financial institutions drove the increase in account penetration in all regions except sub-Saharan Africa, where almost one-third of account holders dial into the financial system using mobile money accounts. The rising popularity of these accounts helped push overall account penetration in the region to 34%, up from 24% in 2011.”
South Asia and East Asia and the Pacific are home to about half of the world’s 2 billion “unbanked” adults. In South Asia, about 625 million adults lack account access, and the same is true for about 490 million adults in East Asia and the Pacific. India, China and Indonesia alone account for 38% of unbanked adults globally.
Sub-Saharan Africa has the next-largest population of unbanked adults, at about 350 million – or 17% of the global total.
METHOD: Results are based on telephone and face-to-face interviews with approximately 1,000 adults per country, aged 15 and older, conducted in 2014 in more than 140 economies. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error ranged from ± 2.5 percentage points to ± 5.2 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.