For Nigeria's Displaced People, the Problem Isn't Access. It's Whether Money Follows Them.

Key points

• Most displaced people in Nigeria have opened bank accounts, but identity requirements, agent cash shortages and failed transactions keep sustained use low.
• Humanitarian aid accounts often work only in one location, so moving for work or safety can mean losing access to support.
• Interoperable payments would let money follow displaced people, but only alongside fixes to identity systems, fee transparency and aid disbursement design.

For Nigeria’s Displaced People, the Problem Isn’t Access. It’s Whether Money Follows Them.

“In my country you can have access to your money from any bank, kiosk, or any place the money is sent to. But in Nigeria if you don’t have a bank account, you can’t receive money.”

A male refugee in Benue State, Nigeria, told me this during a focus group discussion. He was comparing the payment system he’d left behind in Cameroon to the one he now had to navigate in Nigeria. It’s a small comment, but it captures something that months of fieldwork across Nigeria’s displacement camps and host communities kept surfacing: for people who have been forced to move, the value of money isn’t just that you have it — it’s whether you can actually reach it, wherever you land next.

That question sits at the center of this study I recently conducted on forcibly displaced persons (FDPs) — internally displaced people and refugees — and their relationship with Nigeria’s financial system. Nigeria hosts roughly 3.4 million internally displaced people and over 86,000 refugees. A 2024 Central Bank of Nigeria diagnostic had  flagged something puzzling about this population: 82% of those surveyed had opened a bank account, yet actual, sustained use of that account was strikingly low. High access, low utility. My study set out to understand why — sitting down with displaced people, host community members, bank and mobile money agents, and humanitarian programme managers across Borno, Benue, and Katsina states to hear it in their own words.

What came back wasn’t a story about people who don’t want formal finance. It was a story about a system that keeps quietly locking them out, one small failure at a time.

An identity system that can’t keep up with displacement

A refugee ID card that was accepted to open a basic account last year is often no longer enough to upgrade it — a 2023 regulatory change now requires Nigeria’s National Identification Number (NIN) for higher account tiers, and that number is exactly what displacement makes hardest to obtain. One woman told us her name was recorded differently across her refugee papers and her national ID, so simply proving she was herself meant a trip to court for an affidavit. Another had fled with no documents at all, and every attempt to fix that meant more transport money she didn’t have.

Agents who run out of cash and transfers that vanish

In places without a bank branch, a nearby POS agent is often the only real option — except agents run out of cash by evening, charge inconsistently, and sometimes a transaction fails after the money has already left your account. One man described being debited, disputing it, and waiting 21 days for a refund. Multiply that by every displaced household managing food money on a knife’s edge, and it’s easy to see why trust erodes so quickly.

When aid itself becomes a trap

There’s a quieter kind of exclusion too: humanitarian aid accounts often only work in one designated location, so moving to find work or safety means having your card blocked. Accountability and security measures meant to protect displaced people end up confining them instead.

What people actually asked for

Threaded through all of this was one consistent theme: people didn’t want a fundamentally different financial system. They wanted the one they had to actually follow them. A wallet that still works if you travel to Lagos. An account that can send and receive from any bank, not just the one branch nearby. A way to cash out at whichever agent has cash today, not whichever agent they happen to be locked into.

That’s essentially a description of open, interoperable payment infrastructure — the kind of system Interledger and its partners are working to build. In the scenario exercises we ran, this wasn’t an abstract concept to participants; the moment we described being able to move money between any bank or wallet and cash out anywhere, people understood immediately what it would mean for their daily lives. But the study also surfaced the limits of what interoperability alone can do: it can’t fix a broken identity system, can’t rebuild trust after a fraud scare, and won’t matter if the nearest agent still has no cash. Portability of money only helps once someone has cleared the door to have money at all.

A narrow but real window

Nigeria’s next National Financial Inclusion Strategy is being drafted now, and displaced people were left out of the last one (opens in a new tab)entirely. That’s a real opportunity to change course — not by inventing new products for FDPs, but by making the rails that already exist actually reach them: interoperable enough to follow people across banks, agents, and cities, and paired with identity systems, fee transparency, and humanitarian disbursement models that don’t quietly work against the people they’re meant to serve.

Interoperability’s biggest impact may not be for people already comfortably banked and looking for convenience. It may be for people who’ve already lost almost everything else — for whom a payment system that simply keeps working, wherever they end up, isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a lifeline.