Nigeria amplifies efforts to ID prisoners, expand social register

Nigeria’s National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) says its inclusive national digital ID efforts are yielding positive results in the correctional services sector with 74 percent of all prison inmates in the country now having a National Identification Number (NIN).

The NIMC head of corporate communications, Dr Kayode Adegoke, made the announcement in a June 9 statement, noting that the percentage corresponds to 59, 786 inmates.

In collaboration with the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCoS), the NIMC said the initiative, which aligns with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda aiming to enroll all Nigerians and legal residents, will continue with the remaining inmates to be enrolled in the months ahead.

The ID authority said it is grateful to key stakeholders for the successful inmates enrollment drive so far, namely the Minister of Interior, Dr. Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, the Comptroller-General of the NCoS, Sylvester Nwakuche Ndidi, and the management and staff of the institution.

Meanwhile, the NIMC also announced the imminent commencement of “ward-level” enrollment across the country, describing it as a major component of President Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda to strengthen the National Identity System.

Expanding and consolidating the social register

As part of the push by the federal government to streamline its social protection initiatives, efforts are being multiplied to set up a robust and reliable social register that supports the effective distribution of social benefits payments.

Recently, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, Nentawe Yilwatda, disclosed that the federal government had deployed an AI system to identify poor citizens living in slum neighbourhoods in the country’s urban areas.

The minister was quoted in a report by The Cable as explaining that this has enabled them to expand the social register, taking the number from 13 million to 19.7 million people.

From the beginning of the poverty relief assistance program, only the rural poor were targeted, but when the President asked that it be expanded, Yilwatda said they “used satellite imagery to locate urban slums, then base stations and telecoms data to identify phone numbers in those locations.”

“AI helped us generate a list of urban poor individuals by verifying those numbers, their access to financial services, and other indicators. So now, the updated social register covers both rural and urban communities, making it more inclusive and reliable,” he stated, as quoted.

At the end of last year, the federal government said 25 million Nigerians had received cash payments enabled by digital ID under the poverty alleviation project.

In May, 2.3 million identities were revalidated through biometric verification in collaboration with the NIMC, paving the way for payments.

Centralized ID registry for PWDs

In a related development, the Nigerian president’s senior special assistant on special needs and equal opportunities, Mohammed Isa, told The Cable in an interview that the federal government was working to establish a centralized register for persons living with disabilities (PWDs).

In the interview in which Isa discussed the challenges faced by PWDs in Nigeria, he addressed the difficulties in providing cash support to that category of persons due to lack of a streamlined database for them.

“There is no centralized database of PWDs in Nigeria. Everyone works with his/her own data,” he lamented in the interview.

“That is why my office is currently working with the stakeholders to develop a centralized comprehensive database of PWDs that is disaggregated in order to ensure that the database accurately reflects the needs of PWDs and informs policy decisions.”

Article Topics

Africa  |  civil registration  |  digital identity  |  identity management  |  legal identity  |  National Identity Management Commission (NIMC)  |  Nigeria