Kenya has long been celebrated as Africa’s mobile money pioneer. With over 33 million registered M-Pesa users and a digital lending market that grew 22% year-on-year into 2026, the narrative of financial inclusion progress is compelling. But the data underneath that narrative tells a more complicated story; and financial institutions that rely on the headline without interrogating the detail are making decisions on incomplete ground.
The 2025 FinAccess Household Survey revealed that while formal financial access reached 83.7% of Kenyan adults, meaningful access, the ability to borrow affordably, save securely, and transact without prohibitive fees, remained structurally uneven. Women, rural households, and informal sector workers consistently reported worse outcomes on every dimension of financial health, even when nominally “included” in the system.
Digital lending has accelerated inclusion on one metric while worsening it on another. The number of Kenyans with active mobile credit accounts grew sharply between 2023 and 2026. So did the number flagged on credit reference bureau databases for non-performing loans. The Central Bank of Kenya’s 2025 Credit Officer Survey confirmed that non-performing loans in the retail segment rose for a fifth consecutive quarter, driven largely by digital credit defaults among borrowers in the KSh 500–5,000 bracket; the exact segment that financial inclusion programmes are designed to serve.
What this moment demands is not more product deployment. It is better research. Understanding why borrowers default, whether through liquidity stress, loan stacking across multiple platforms, predatory fee structures, or genuine financial distress; requires the kind of behavioural financial research that moves beyond account-opening statistics into actual usage patterns and repayment outcomes.
For banks, MFIs, and fintechs operating in Kenya’s 2026 credit market, market research is no longer a planning tool. It is a risk management necessity. The institutions building evidence-based consumer understanding today are the ones that will sustain inclusion outcomes that last beyond the next product cycle.
Kichata Research Ltd provides financial services market research and consumer credit behaviour studies across Kenya and East Africa. Get in touch →
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