Here's the problem, stated as bluntly as the data allows: the global financial-inclusion field has spent fifteen years optimizing for a metric — account ownership — that has almost no mechanical relationship to whether people are financially better off.

Global Findex reports 79% worldwide account ownership in 2025, up 28 points since 2011, and that number drives billions of dollars in donor funding, regulatory design, and telco strategy. 2 billion — sit dormant in any given month. A metric that a majority of the underlying accounts fail to satisfy on an ongoing basis is not measuring inclusion. It's measuring registration.

This matters because registration and use are optimized by different, sometimes opposing, incentive structures. Registering a new mobile money account is cheap for a telco and often mandatory-adjacent (SIM registration bundling, agent commissions per sign-up, KYC drives tied to regulatory or donor targets). None of those incentives depend on the account being used twice.

Sustained use, by contrast, requires the product to actually beat the alternative — cash — on cost, reliability, and trust, every single month, for a population that is disproportionately exposed to transaction fees, mobile money—specific taxes (Uganda and Kenya both levy them), network gaps, and fraud.

The result is a predictable divergence: registration curves that climb smoothly for donor reports, sitting on top of usage curves that plateau or erode.

The deeper failure is institutional, not just statistical. The World Bank, CGAP, USAID, and national financial-inclusion strategies all use ownership-based indicators as their primary success metric because those numbers are cheap to collect (a single survey question: "do you have an account?") and always move in a reassuring direction.

Usage-based metrics are harder to collect consistently across regulatory regimes, less flattering, and would force a public accounting of why hundreds of millions of accounts that count as "inclusion successes" produce no measurable financial behavior change for their holders.

Nobody with funding at stake has a strong incentive to be the one who proposes replacing the metric that makes their program look good with one that might not.

The population affected is enormous and specific: several hundred million people, concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, who are counted in every "financial inclusion has never been higher" headline while deriving little to no ongoing benefit from the account attributed to them.