Access to basic drinking water and sanitation in Africa: Does financial inclusion matter?

A major challenge confronting most countries in the world including those in Africa, is lack of access to basic drinking water and sanitation. This has given birth to several studies investigating the factors that influence access to basic drinking water and sanitation. Notwithstanding, while financial inclusion is highly extolled for its welfare-enhancing effects and hence could play a major role in accessing basic drinking water and sanitation services, there is a dearth of empirical evidence in this regard, especially in the African context. This study, therefore, attempts at providing the foremost empirical evidence of the effect of financial inclusion on access to basic drinking water and sanitation in Africa using a sample of 33 countries for the period 2004 to 2018. The random effects and the fixed effects regressions are used as baseline estimation techniques and the Instrumental Variable Fixed Effects (IVFE) regression is employed as a robustness check. Our findings show that, financial inclusion enhances access to basic drinking water and sanitation services, irrespective of the estimator used. The implication is that, expanding financial inclusion can be used as an effective strategy towards enhancing access to basic drinking water and sanitation services in Africa.