Nigeria's microbanking sector is experience unprecedented growth as it aims to expand coverage for low income clients. Photo courtesy of the World Bank

Telling stories with data

Starting in 2006, the Central Bank of Nigeria began transitioning several hundred community banks into official licensed microfinance banks. Now Africa’s most populous country has over 900 microfinance banks as the sector continues to experiences rapid growth. This is just the start. A lot more growth is needed to help the 60 percent of Nigerians who still lack basic access to financial services. We partnered with Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX) to design visualization tools to look at the data on microfinance banks in Nigeria and help MIX better understand Nigeria’s access to finance for low income clients. The interactive maps are all public on Nigeria.MixMarket.org

Subnational Mapping

The interactive maps tell the story of the microfinance landscape in Nigeria and raise questions by making it easy to compare other data sets to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s listing of licensed microfinance banks. Users can navigate the maps and visualize the data in a number of ways.

The maps lets you quickly see a national view of banking operations. Here you can see the total number of microfinance banks licensed by the Central Bank of Nigeria as density points geocoded at the state level. As you zoom in, the detail of the bank data increases to local government areas where that data is available. The bank data can be toggled between “licensed” and “provisional” status, which changes the density points.

Sharing Open Data

All maps on the site were built using TileMill, our open source map design studio. The maps are publicly available at tiles.mapbox.com/mix on our map hosting service TileStream.

The site lets you share any map just like you would a YouTube video. All it takes to embed a map is to copy one line of code using the scissors icon and embed the current view of the map anywhere on the web. A large goal of the site is to let people share and tell their own stories around the data, and this embed features makes it easy to do so.

Serving People in Need

This is just the first part of MIX’s wider research into microfinance in Nigeria. By having the data in an interactive visual format, we can now ask important questions like whether people in need have access to microfinance banks. For a more detailed analysis on microbanking in Nigeria, Scott Gaul has a good post and analysis on the larger microfinance landscape in Nigeria.