…Specific interventions are required to ensure that these vulnerable communities are not left behind
FRI 26 NOV, 2021-theGBJournal- The Inclusion for All initiative, an advocacy programme that seeks to remove the barriers that prevent the financial and economic inclusion of Nigeria’s poorest and most vulnerable communities, has released its most recent research findings through an open-source data visualisation platform. The Inclusion for All platform allows interested stakeholders to navigate rich data-sets on inclusion that help the user understand the issues and challenges for themselves. The findings and platform were launched at a roundtable event on November 23, 2021.
Inclusion for All research has previously demonstrated that the poorer you are, the less likely you are to have ID. The latest research sought to identify the specific communities and groups that are most likely to be excluded from Nigeria’s identity system, by analysing data from the 2020 Enhancing Financial Innovation and Access Access to Finance Survey.
Inclusion for all released the results of this research during a live virtual event which brought together a select group of stakeholders and interest groups including senior policymakers, technical specialists and private sector participants, to discuss the findings, highlight the potential reasons for them and begin to shape solutions that can be implemented collaboratively.
Engr. Aliyu Aziz – Director General & CEO – NIMC; Dr Joe Abah – Public Policy Advisor & Nigeria Country Director, DAI; Hajia Aisha Ahmed, CEO of the Murna Foundation, Dr Agu Osoka, Managing Director, Biosec Solutions; Nkem Okocha, Founder, Mamamoni; and Tolulope Babajide, Financial Inclusion & Gender Coordinator, Sahel Consulting joined a panel discussion to explore ‘How to optimise the implementation of Nigeria’s identity programme to enable easy access for the country’s most marginalised communities’.
All panellists agreed that ID is a strategic enabler to improve inclusion and enhance access to credit, and other economic opportunities for women and other marginalised segments of society. They had different perspectives on the most important actions that need to be taken to accelerate access including:
-Improved funding structures to enable sustainability in the ecosystem;
-Wider and more substantive ecosystem partnerships;
-Mass awareness raising about the value and importance of identity amongst marginalised groups.
-Flexibility in data capture methodology, to account for the fact that marginalised groups often do not have readable biometrics.
Commenting on the findings and the discussions at the roundtable, Chinasa Collins-Ogbuo – Head of the Inclusion for All Initiative said, “We are clearly identifying the groups of Nigerians who most need help to access identity and they are, as we have feared, the most vulnerable. I am delighted that we were able to bring together such a strong group of panellists to discuss the findings and identify potential solutions that we can implement to overcome the challenges. We will be following up with them to build a detailed set of recommendations for action that can frame the development of interventions over the coming months, as we ramp up our support for these communities and work to ensure that they can find a way into the formal economy.”
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