Formal and informal financial inclusion and its impact on health: empirical evidence from South Africa
Lwando Mjacu, Vikela Liso Sithole, Palesa Makhetha-Kosi · 2026
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Description
Lwando Mjacu, Vikela Liso Sithole, and Palesa Makhetha-Kosi published a 2026 study of how financial inclusion, formal and informal, relates to health in South Africa. Access to banking shapes whether people can pay for care, yet informal arrangements such as stokvel savings clubs and mashonisa lenders dominate many communities. The team combined all five waves of a national income study into panel data and modelled self-rated health with a random-effects ordered probit approach suited to repeated answers.
Formal inclusion behaved as hoped: people with savings or credit access were more likely to report better health. Informal inclusion pointed the other way, with heavier reliance on informal finance shifting people toward worse reported health. The contrast drives the policy advice: pull informal savings and credit inside the formal digital economy and dismantle the barriers that keep the formal system from serving everyone well.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Lwando Mjacu, Vikela Liso Sithole, Palesa Makhetha-Kosi |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 41571 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |