Financial Literacy and Retirement Planning In Sub-Saharan Africa: A Systematic Review for Social Work Practice

Background: Retirement is an inevitable milestone for workers, whether employed in the formal or informal sector. With improved healthcare and technological advancements, people are expected to live much longer. This rising life expectancy means more people will transition from active work to an extended retirement phase, making the issue of retirement and retirement-related planning more critical. Research has demonstrated that retirement is often met with significant financial challenges. Thus, financial planning before retirement is a vital topic that deserves much attention. While financial literacy may contribute to better planning, intervention studies conducted in the sub-Saharan African (SSA) context are lacking, hampering a nuanced understanding of how financial literacy could be leveraged to improve retirement planning, especially for SSA’s informal sector. This study reviews the scope of evidence of the relationship between financial literacy (an important predictor of retirement planning) and retirement planning in SSA to inform the development and testing of future interventions.

Methods: A systematic search of 7 databases was conducted following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Inclusion criteria included: 1) (a) the paper must have been conducted in a country or countries in SSA, (b) it must have been published in a peer-reviewed journal or gray literature in the last 10 years, (c) it should focus on retirement planning as one of its outcomes, and (d) the main independent variable should be financial literacy. The 8-item Joanna Briggs Institute guideline for cross-sectional studies was used to assess study rigor, with possible total scale scores ranging from 0-8. Studies that scored at or above the mean were considered high rigor, and those below the mean were low rigor.

Results: The systematic database search from 2015 to 2026 yielded 1347 studies, of which 16 met the inclusion criteria following title, abstract, and full text screening. All studies were cross-sectional and examined the relationship between financial literacy and retirement planning. Most studies (n=16) reported a significant association between financial literacy and retirement planning, while two reported a non-significant association. Different studies measured financial literacy differently, which may have impacted the study findings. For example, some studies measured financial literacy based on the understanding of various financial products. Other studies defined financial literacy based on the ability to compute interest and inflation rates or participants’ money management behaviors.

Conclusions and Implications: Financial literacy correlates with retirement preparedness in contexts characterized by limited social protection and labor informality. Hence, policies promoting culturally responsive financial capability initiatives may strengthen long-term economic security. The findings are relevant to low-resource settings with weak pension systems. For social work practice, results support integrating financial capability into aging services, workforce development efforts, and community supports, particularly for informal-sector workers.