National Financial inclusion stakeholders, led by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), will converge on Thursday and Friday, this week, in Abuja, for the launch of key policy documents aimed at facilitating the attainment of 80 per cent inclusion rate by 2020.
The Policy documents to be unveiled at the conference expected to attract over 400 delegates are the Revised National Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS 2.0), the Financial Literacy Framework, the Consumer Protection Framework and the Consumer Education framework.
According to CBN, the conference also aims at ensuring that new comers into the financial inclusion bracket are adequately protected and educated in line with the provisions of the policy documents.
Other objectives of the two-day conference to be declared open by the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, include updating participants on the growing sophistication of the financial market, the competitive environment in which financial services providers operate and the benefit and value of providing access to financial services, among others.
While hoping to enhance consumer confidence and trust in the financial services to facilitate progress towards achieving 80 per cent financial inclusion goal by 2020, the apex bank and other stakeholders also seek to obtain customer feedback on how best to implement the financial inclusion policies.
Latest figures released by Enhancing Financial Innovation and Access (EFInA) indicate that 36.6 million Nigerian adults, representing about 36.8 per cent of the Nigerian adult population, do not have access to formal financial Services.
To achieve the financial inclusion target, Nigeria, through the stakeholders, seeks to cut the exclusion rate down to 20 per cent by the year 2020, hence various public and private organisations, under the auspices of national financial inclusion stakeholders, have been working assiduously since the launch of the first National Financial Inclusion Strategy in 2012, to achieve the objective of 80 per cent inclusion by 2020.
