Kehinde A. Adetiloye

The banking system, which has been the fulcrum of funding for Nigeria’s economy, is plagued by instability in the face of a growing amount of non-performing loans. This is examined in the current milieu of the need for funding the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Using a number of proxies for SDGs 8 and 9, annual time series data covering 1992 to 2019 were used with variables such as GDP per capita, commercial banks’ loans to small-scale enterprises, banking system stability indicators and liquid assets to total assets of banks. The study utilized the Autoregressive Distributed Lag. Findings showed that banking system stability has a significant positive effect on funding the SDGs 8 and 9 beyond the five per cent level of significance within the study period. Non-performing loans remained negative throughout the study. The result suggests that banking stability would enhance funding of the SDGs, and banks would be stable if they finance the SDGs. The policy implication explains the importance of banks actively pursuing opportunities to build sustainable enterprises and developing strategies that will enable their core banking business to be more venture-driven rather than consumer-oriented. In conclusion, there is a need to completely eliminate or reduce the quantum of non-performing loans from the system and establish a regulatory framework that will facilitate its expected role of intermediation in the economy profitably and successfully.

Acknowledgment
The authors would like to appreciate Covenant University for financial support to publish this paper.

Most government and international financial institutions worldwide have adopted financial inclusion as a veritable platform for achieving the Social Development Goals of hunger and poverty eradication, inequality reduction, and employment creation. Their efforts will not yield much dividend if a sizeable part of the populace are constrained from social and formal financial inclusion due to social disorder. This study examined the relationship between social seclusion of forcibly displaced persons from formal financial inclusion in twenty-seven Sub-Saharan African countries. Granger Error Correction Method (ECM) with Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) was used to analyze the short panel data obtained from the World Bank database. The study found a negative long-run relationship between social seclusion and financial inclusion. That is, an increase in social menace overtime will result in more people being financially excluded from formal financial transactions. It, therefore, recommends, amongst others, that government should encourage forcibly displaced persons to become gainfully employed and productive. Specifically, persons in refugee and internally displaced persons camps should be trained to acquire skills that will enable them to become self-employed, create wealth for themselves, and contribute actively to the sustainable economic growth of their host country rather than just provide food and other welfare packages as a temporal palliative for survival.