Multilevel Modelling of Digital Exclusion for Improving Women's Financial Resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa

Women's financial resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa is shaped by access to digital technologies, yet the association between digital exclusion and resilience is rarely examined with methods that respect the clustering of women within country contexts. This study fits two-level multilevel logistic models to 24,506 women in 48 country-waves drawn from 24 economies in the 2017 and 2021 Global Findex surveys. Financial resilience is the ability to raise emergency funds within 30 days, and digital exclusion is a composite index of phone, smartphone and internet access and use. Country-waves account for 14.9% of the variance in resilience (median odds ratio = 2.06). A one standard deviation increase in exclusion is associated with 26% lower odds of resilience (odds ratio = 0.74), equivalent to an average reduction of 6.0 percentage points in probability. The association varies across country-waves (slope variance = 0.025), and cross-level interactions show that it is weaker where mobile broadband coverage and legal gender equality are higher and stronger where the gender gap in mobile phone ownership is wider. Each moderator accounts for 59.9% to 62.3% of the slope variance. Results are stable across weighted, probit, alternative clustering and leave-one-country-out specifications. The findings are associations rather than causal effects, and they indicate where digital inclusion measures for women are most closely aligned with financial resilience.