Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Continuing growth in the technologies of risk reengineering and the reforms in the global neo-liberal market to boost consumer market inclusion have generated different national economic policies and project implementations for the inclusion of consumers previously excluded from the credit and financial market. In Nigeria, the vision 2020 policy and project benchmark is the increased inclusion of 70% of Nigerians into the banking system. It is believed that increased inclusion of the underbanked to the banking system will enhance their access to financial products like savings and credits. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) took vigorous measures to ensure the compliance of banks and financial houses (FHs); however, the designs and strategies of inclusion employed by the banks and/or FHs have received little analytical studies and neither have there been studies on how the large-scale poverty in Nigeria could be ameliorated through the financial market system. This study addresses the problem of poverty as a “risk” and applies the intersection of socio-political economic behavioral analysis to analyze how banks and FHs, using financial market system, undertakes the “risk” in the archetypical Nigeria environment. The study addresses the questions of how the desire for profit by banks and FHs, the financial market uncertainties, and the techniques of risk calculation could or could not provide opportunities for poverty reduction in Nigeria. By so doing an empirical analysis of how self-responsibilization, discipline, and the disciplining of the market apparatus encourage individualized market welfare provisioning. Overall, the research is predicated on the need to apply a multidisciplinary social science approach in the study of consumer credit availability, accessibility, affordability, and bank-led financial inclusion strategy in Nigeria. It is motivated by both the governmental and non-governmental pursuit of policies and projects that will produce solution to the problems of credit and lack of opportunities to credit and finance. The research is designed to help in the empirical understanding of the implementation of the national financial strategy on financial inclusion and how access to and affordability of inclusion in the bank and financial market system will produce positive policy projects for the problems of poverty and its associated fragilities in Nigeria sociological, political economy, and political psychology. Also, informed by the technological transformation of access to consumer credit in Nigeria, the research finds great resonance with the need to making contribution to the evolving empirical investigation on credit affordability developments since the launch of the 2012 national financial inclusion strategy in Nigeria.