EFInA has finished consumer protection sensitisation dialogues in Mani and Malumfashi local government areas of Katsina State, reaching more than 1,000 residents on April 25 and 26. The sessions were meant to help people understand their rights, how to complain when things go wrong, and how to use financial services more safely.
The push mattered because the baseline work that shaped it had already shown a difficult picture in rural communities: low awareness of consumer rights, limited knowledge of complaint channels and falling trust in financial institutions. In Mani and Malumfashi, that gap was visible in the very people the programme was designed to reach — women, youth, vulnerable groups and people living in underserved communities.
Hajiya Bilkisu Suleiman Ibrahim said access to affordable and reliable financial services is important, especially for women, youth, vulnerable groups and people living in underserved communities. Her point framed the day’s message clearly: consumer protection is not abstract policy language, but the difference between using financial services with confidence and avoiding them altogether.
The forums brought together community members, local officials, traditional and religious leaders, financial service providers and regulators for discussions that ranged from fraud prevention and complaint resolution to agency banking, ATM transaction disputes, fraud awareness, BVN protection and the role of POS agents in widening access. Chinasa Collins-Ogbuo said the project exists to create the kind of space where communities can sit across from the institutions that regulate their financial lives, ask hard questions and get straight answers.
Post-event assessments in Malumfashi suggested that approach worked. Participants who rated their understanding of consumer rights as very clear rose from 80 before the event to 331 afterwards, and 349 of 354 respondents said their trust in regulators had improved. That kind of shift is not small in places where trust has been weakening for a long time.
But the sessions also exposed the parts of the system people still fear. Questions kept returning to fraudulent credit empowerment schemes, identity-based loan fraud and unresolved transaction disputes, the kind of problems that can erase whatever confidence a good forum builds if they are never fixed. Uchenna Enyioha said the deeper question is whether financial services are trusted, safe, understandable and responsive when things go wrong, and the Malumfashi findings showed that residents are still asking it.
EFInA said the insights from Mani and Malumfashi will shape future policy discussions with regulators and industry stakeholders. The next test is whether those talks produce practical fixes for complaint handling, fraud control and dispute resolution, or whether the same abuses keep undercutting the trust the sessions were designed to restore.
