Impact of Financial Technology on Poverty Alleviation in Nigeria

Abstract

This study explores the impact of financial technology (fintech) on poverty alleviation in Nigeria from 1986 to 2024. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach was adopted in analyzing the secondary data used for the study which were sourced from the World Bank database, National Bureau of Statistics and Central Bank of Nigeria. The results found that fintech, financial inclusion, literacy rate and urbanization have positive impact on poverty reduction, while financial deepening has negative, significant short run impact but insignificant long run impact on poverty alleviation. It was further shown that both in the long and short term, the estimated impact of literacy rate and urbanization were statistically significant, while fintech was insignificant. Also, financial inclusion was found to have considerable impact on poverty in the long run, though it tends to be negligible in the short run. Thus, it is recommended that government should collaborate with private organizations to develop and deploy Fintech solutions that would improve access, thereby alleviating poverty in Nigeria.