IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/prbchp/978-3-032-04602-4_11.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Impact of COVID-19 Lockdowns on Financial Inclusion in Sub-saharan Africa

In: Emerging Markets and Industrialized Countries in the New Wave of Globalization

Author

Listed:
  • Désiré Avom

    (University of Yaoundé II)

  • Yvan Audrey Kamdem

    (University of Yaoundé II)

Abstract

Empirical evidence on the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on financial inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is limited, with most studies focusing on a single indicator. This paper fills that gap by using a composite financial inclusion index and a difference-in-differences design to assess the effects of lockdowns on 87,080 adults across 29 SSA countries, drawing from the World Bank's Global Findex surveys (2014, 2017, and 2021). We find that in countries with lockdowns, the financial inclusion index increased by nearly one percentage point, with a more significant rise in Southern and Eastern Africa than in Central and Western Africa. We also show that the impact of lockdowns varies by dimension and indicator of financial inclusion, underscoring the importance of using a composite index. Additionally, partial lockdowns were found to have a stronger positive impact on financial inclusion compared to full lockdowns. These results are robust across alternative estimation techniques and control variables. Thus, the COVID-19 lockdowns did not reverse the progress made in promoting financial inclusion in SSA.

Suggested Citation

  • Désiré Avom & Yvan Audrey Kamdem, 2025. "Impact of COVID-19 Lockdowns on Financial Inclusion in Sub-saharan Africa," Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics, in: Gilles Dufrénot & Kimiko Sugimoto (ed.), Emerging Markets and Industrialized Countries in the New Wave of Globalization, pages 243-265, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:prbchp:978-3-032-04602-4_11
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-04602-4_11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:prbchp:978-3-032-04602-4_11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.