Publication: The dynamics of financial inclusion in Ethiopia: Diversifying delivery channels, expanding digital technology, and enhancing financial knowledge for greater financial inclusion
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Date
2025-04-29
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2025-04-29
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The report seeks to inform how the country can accelerate nationwide integration into the formal financial system to enable progress in poverty reduction, equality, and other relevant reforms under the HGERA. The report supports the ongoing reforms in the financial sector and identifies strategic priorities and types of interventions. The goal is to fully understand the extent to which individuals in the country access and use formal financial services. Measuring financial inclusion, quantifying the effectiveness of initiatives such as mobile banking, banking agents, and financial education programs, and identifying and understanding the pathways to enabling people to enter the financial system is essential for policymakers and practitioners working to develop and design policies and programs meant to promote financial inclusion. In this regard, the report emphasizes looking at various indicators simultaneously to measure the progress of financial inclusion. The objective of the study is to examine the evolution of the financial inclusion of individuals over time, identify the pathways that enable an individual’s decision to move out of being unbanked, define the channels people use to enter the financial system, and explore opportunities to drive up equitable financial inclusion. The study also measures financial inclusion in different dimensions and reviews their simultaneous development. It provides evidence to validate constraints to and enablers of financial inclusion in the context of gender and spatial disparities in the socioeconomic landscape. While the study explores the factors that contribute to or hinder financial inclusion, it emphasizes the role of human capital, which is financial knowledge and awareness, as well as technology, in promoting financial inclusion.
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“Yonis, Manex B.; Ambel, Alemayehu A.; Di Salvo, Francesco; Rawlins, Marlon R.. 2025. The dynamics of financial inclusion in Ethiopia: Diversifying delivery channels, expanding digital technology, and enhancing financial knowledge for greater financial inclusion. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/43135 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.”
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On the transfer side, direct social protection transfers and indirect transfers, mainly spending on primary education and health services, promote gender equality better than other types of government spending.Publication Gender Implications of Rural Land Use Fee and Agricultural Income Tax in Ethiopia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06)Land use fees and agricultural income tax in Ethiopia are levied on rural landholders according to the size of agricultural landholdings. Summarizing the evidence presented in the authors paper based on new, nationally-representative data on taxation of households and individual landholdings and rights in the Fourth Ethiopian Socioeconomic Survey, this brief discusses how area-based land taxes are regressive and the tax burdens for female-only households are larger than for dual-adult households. Social norms limiting women’s roles in agriculture and a gender agricultural productivity gap are likely to be a source of this gender bias. Lower tax rates for smallholders can reduce women’s tax burdens, but area-based land taxation would continue to be regressive.
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