Decolonising Digital Finance and Accounting in Nigeria: Indigenous Financial Practices and Implications for Informal Entrepreneurship

This chapter situates the interface of indigenous Nigerian financial practices and responsiveness to the fast-growing digital financial technologies within an explicit decolonial frame. While celebrated as a route to modernisation and economic growth in West Africa, through financial inclusion policies and FinTech innovations, this narrative is what reproduces the very colonial logics by which indigenous financial institutions were marginalised and entrepreneurial norms were localised. This chapter synthesises evidence on community-based financial practices in Nigeria. The chapter contends a decolonial research and practice agenda that repositions indigenous financial logics as legitimate and dynamic foundations for designing inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystems. It advocates for the co-creation of financial tools with local communities, embedding trust mechanisms rooted in culture on digital platforms. Additionally, it recommends reforming policy frameworks to recognise hybrid informal, formal systems, rather than forcing them into less flexible compliance models from the West. It highlights that healthy, fair money access in Nigeria, and all over West Africa, needs a change in thinking that respects local pasts, shares power more widely, and encourages socially fair types of businesses beyond the main colonial-capitalist model.