Women, Informality, and Finance: Designing Systems That Actually Work

Somewhere in Nigeria today, a woman will successfully run a business, repay informal debt, contribute to a savings group, support her household, and still be considered financially risky by the formal systems supposedly built to include her.

This is one of the greatest contradictions in financial inclusion today.

Across emerging economies, billions of dollars have gone into expanding formal financial systems through digital banking, mobile money, fintech, agency networks, and financial literacy programmes. On paper, the numbers suggest progress. More people now have bank accounts, and digital payments are growing rapidly. Yet millions remain financially underserved not because financial products do not exist, but because many systems are still designed around assumptions disconnected from everyday realities.

This contradiction is especially visible in Nigeria, where women play significant roles in the informal economy through trade, agriculture, caregiving and small-scale enterprises that keep households and communities functioning daily. Yet many financial systems are still built around assumptions of stability and predictability, while millions of people navigate economic realities shaped far more by uncertainty and economic survival.

According to EFInA’s 2023 Access to Financial Services survey, women account for the majority of Nigerians who save and borrow informally. Among the 16 million Nigerian adults who save through informal channels, 9 million are women. Among the 9 million adults who borrow informally, 5 million are women. More than 18 million Nigerian women also remain financially excluded despite their active participation in economic life. Women are not financially excluded because they are economically inactive. In many cases, they are excluded because the systems defining financial legitimacy were never fully designed around the realities of their lives.

During the course of my work, one thing that has become increasingly clear is that many institutions still misunderstand what it truly means to design for women. Having women in mind is not the same as building with women’s realities at the centre of decision-making. True inclusion requires more than intention. It requires understanding barriers deeply enough that those barriers actively shape how products are designed from the beginning.

It means asking harder questions before products reach the market. What happens if a woman relies on a shared phone, struggles with poor network coverage, or cannot comfortably read onboarding instructions in English? What happens if one failed transfer, delayed reversal, or unexplained charge is enough to push someone back toward the informal systems that already feel more predictable?

Real inclusion begins when these realities stop being treated as secondary considerations and start becoming central design priorities. A woman in a rural community may technically have access to a bank account and still avoid using it because digital systems often feel uncertain in practice. A failed transfer is not merely a technical inconvenience when it could mean food not bought, transport missed, or stock not replaced for the next day. Hidden charges, unstable connectivity, delayed reversals, and weak dispute resolution processes quietly erode trust over time.

A product can be available and still feel difficult to use consistently or safely. Even compliance systems reveal this disconnect. KYC requirements are often built around the assumption that people’s records, phone numbers, and identification details will align easily across formal systems. But for many women across informal economies, proving identity can be far less seamless. A phone number may not match. Names may appear differently across documents. Resolving these issues may require travelling long distances, navigating unfamiliar processes, or spending valuable time and income trying to restore access to systems they are already hesitant to trust. What institutions experience as compliance, many women experience as frustration and yet another reminder that formal systems were never designed with their realities at the centre, and that feeling often determines whether those systems are used, avoided, or abandoned.

At the same time, builders increasingly face another difficult tension that is often overlooked in public conversations around inclusion. Expanding access cannot come at the expense of financial safety. The easier systems become to access and navigate, the more vulnerable they can also become to fraud, scams, identity abuse, and exploitation. The challenge, therefore, is not simply making systems more accessible but building systems that people can safely access, confidently use, and genuinely trust.

This is partly why informal financial systems continue to remain deeply trusted despite rapid fintech expansion across Africa. Ajo groups, thrift collections, cooperative societies, and community savings systems evolved around actual human behaviour instead of expecting human behaviour to adapt itself around institutional structures. They understand fluctuating income because they were built within communities where fluctuating income is normal. They understand social trust because financial survival in many communities has always depended on relationships as much as capital.

Institutional finance, on the other hand, was largely built around financial behaviour that is easy to track, verify, and document. Stable records. Predictable transactions. Conventional forms of identification and documentation. Many women operating within informal economies may never produce these kinds of institutional markers consistently, even while demonstrating extraordinary financial discipline every single day.

No doubt, formal finance has made meaningful progress. Platforms like OPay and Moniepoint have solved real accessibility problems within Nigeria’s financial ecosystem, particularly around agency banking, convenience and faster onboarding, etc. Their growth demonstrates that people will adopt systems that reduce friction and bring financial services closer to everyday realities. Yet their success also reveals something deeper. Financial inclusion is not simply about opening accounts or enabling transactions. It is also about whether people can confidently access credit, insurance, savings, and financial protection in ways that feel trustworthy, understandable, and genuinely usable within the realities of their lives. Despite the rapid expansion of fintech infrastructure, millions of women still remain outside meaningful financial usage because the barriers often go beyond access alone. Failed transactions, hidden charges, language barriers, low digital confidence, unstable income, cultural norms, and limited control over financial decisions can all quietly shape whether women continue engaging with formal financial systems consistently.

Systems designed around a single idea of the “ideal user” will always struggle to serve people whose financial realities do not fit that assumption, and what many institutions still underestimate is that proximity to reality may be one of the most undervalued forms of innovation in finance today. Too often, products are scaled by standardising experiences in ways that erase the very realities shaping how people interact with money. But scalability does not have to mean uniformity. Systems can still scale while adapting to different literacy levels, infrastructures, languages, and behavioural realities because inclusion at scale requires flexibility, not homogeneity.

That means designing for low-literacy environments instead of assuming fluency. It means understanding why USSD still matters in many communities and why agent networks remain essential in places where trust is still built through human interaction. Most importantly, it means recognising that what many institutions classify as informal behaviour is often how people adapt financially to instability, weak infrastructure, and everyday economic uncertainty.

For millions of women across Nigeria and much of the Global South, informality is not an exception to the economy; it is the economy. Until financial systems learn to design around that reality, millions of women will remain included in statistics while excluded in practice.

About the Writer

Imade Bibowei-Osuobeni is a Nigerian public policy advisor and the founder of Tech Herfrica, an NGO dedicated to the digital and financial inclusion of women and girls in rural Africa, which has trained over 4,000 women. Her work has been recognised by the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations Trade and Development body, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.