Second Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana (BoG), Elsie Addo Awadzi has said that in monitoring progress in financial inclusion, the role of data cannot be overemphasized.
Data, she said, is essential to help measure gaps in inclusion, design appropriate evidence-based interventions, and monitor their implementation and effectiveness.
For data to help achieve these objectives, Mrs Awadzi said “it should be comprehensive, high-quality, consistent, reliable, accessible, and connected with other related data bases. Both supply and demand-side data are key to help achieve these stated objectives.”
She explained that there are currently several key data sources that feed into policy formulation, regulation, and design of financial products and services in Ghana.
These include indicators published by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), African Development Bank (AfDB), and many others, as well as homegrown sources.
Since 2011, she said, the World Bank Global Findex Database has been one of the most comprehensive and authoritative comparative data sources on access to financial services in the developing world.
The Global Findex Database provides almost 300 indicators on topics such as account ownership, payments, saving, credit, and financial resilience, disaggregated on the basis of gender, age, and other demographics, she added.
“The database is based on a demand-side survey covering almost 145,000 people in 139
economies, representing 97 percent of the world’s population. For example, from the
2021 Findex report, we know that mobile money has become an essential driver of
financial inclusion in Ghana, with mobile money accounts surpassing traditional bank
accounts.
“We also know that in Ghana, the gender gap in access to finance as of 2021
was 11 per cent compared to an average of 12 per cent for Sub-Saharan Africa, and
that the percentage of women accessing finance had increased from 27 percent in
2011 to 63 percent in 2021,” she said during the Institute of Statistical Social and Economic Research (ISSER)-World Bank public engagement on 2021 Ghana Findex data and launch of ISSER inclusive finance development series on Thursday, May 4.
She further indicated that the Bank of Ghana has also recently implemented a new online reporting and analytics supervisory tool (ORASS) that helps to harmonise data collection from various licensed institutions, and improves data analytics and reporting.
Secondly, ORASS unifies our licensing databases with our prudential reporting databases to help achieve more comprehensive and effective supervision of licensed institutions. Last but not least, ORASS enables our regulated institutions to submit their prudential returns to us periodically on a disaggregated basis to help us monitor access to finance on a more
granular basis including by gender and age dynamics of their customer base and
product and service offerings.
Overall, this new tool is helping to address what used to be critical supply-side data constraints and has enhanced the Bank’s capacity to produce quality industry reports and dashboards for policy decisions and also extract actionable reports from extensive volume of prudential and regulatory transactional data as well as provide a single decision support system in replacement of the disparate database systems that exists within the banking and payment systems.
“I have no doubt at all that there are many such efforts in Ghana to improve the quality
and availability of data to support financial inclusion efforts. What is however needed
going forward, is a unified data architecture to help connect existing data bases for
effective and consistent policy formulation and regulation, and for the design of
appropriate financial products and services to meet the needs of all economic actors
in Ghana,” she indicated.