Financial Resilience Under Conflict: Access, Use, and Financial Disruption in Sub-Saharan Africa

Armed conflict threatens financial resilience by disrupting the infrastructure, liquidity, information flows, and financial networks that support access to and use of financial services. This study examines how state-based and non-state conflict shape financial access and use across 33 Sub-Saharan African countries. We combine Global Findex 2025 data with 2024 Uppsala Conflict Data Program fatalities and GSMA mobile money regulatory indicators. Financial resilience serves as an interpretive framework rather than a directly observed outcome. The empirical outcomes measure separate dimensions of financial access and use relevant to resilience; they do not directly measure continuity, adaptation, or recovery under conflict exposure. Multilevel mixed-effects logit marginal effects show that a one-standard-deviation increase in state-based conflict intensity corresponds to reductions of 2.9 percentage points in formal financial-institution account ownership and 1.3 percentage points in any-account ownership. State-based conflict is also linked to lower borrowing, domestic remittances, and transfer receipt. Non-state conflict is associated with lower formal financial-institution account ownership, while its associations with most financial-use outcomes are imprecisely estimated; domestic remittances provide weaker evidence of a negative association at the 10 percent level. Predicted probabilities across the conflict distribution further show lower remittance and transfer participation at higher levels of state-based conflict. These findings demonstrate that financial resilience under conflict is function-specific: services requiring active transactions, liquidity, counterparties, and functioning delivery networks are more vulnerable than financial stocks and established institutional receipts. The study advances the literature by distinguishing financial access from actual use and identifying how financial vulnerability varies across conflict types, intensity levels, and financial functions. The findings underscore the need for central banks, financial institutions, and mobile money providers to assess resilience through service functionality rather than account ownership alone. Policy should prioritise payment and transfer continuity, agent liquidity, sustained credit access, network reliability, and resilient financial infrastructure in conflict-exposed economies.