The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has taken the sensitisation exercise of its digital currency, known as the eNaira to the University of Lagos, where a good number of the students of various academic levels onboarded onto the platform.
eNaira was formally launched by President Muhammadu Buhari at the State House, Aso Villa on Monday 25 October 2021.
The eNaira is expected to enhance financial inclusion, support poverty reduction, enable direct welfare disbursement to citizens, support a resilient payments ecosystem, improve availability and usability of central bank money, facilitate diaspora remittances, reduce the cost of processing cash, and reduce cost and improve efficiency of cross-border payment among others.
“eNaira can be used for a number of things including payment of school fees adding that Payments with eNaira are seamless and the settlement is instant,” Rakiya Mohammed, director information technology department, CBN/co-ordinator technical working committee eNaira secretariat, said.
Represented by Khalifa Nuhu from the information technology department, CBN, she said, the CBN has been engaging a number of organizations, groups, institutions and students and part of the objectives of the eNaira is to bring every Nigerian onboard.
She said students are the targets of the CBN’s engagement and that the best place to engage students is in the university.
“So that is why we are here today to sensitize the students and community of Unilag on what eNaira is and also to onboard them,” she said.
While responding to some of the questions asked by the students, the director explained that the eNaira is a CBN digital currency and not a cryptocurrency.
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Speaking with journalists at the event, Afolabi Oke, managing director, Global Interswitch, pointed out that his company partnered with CBN to promote the eNaira and guaranteed the safety of the system.
“The eNaira is completely safe and the CBN has been working on it for several years before they came out. This is very unique. Every other currency is not backed up by the CBN, but our eNaira is backed up by the CBN,” he said.
Uche Emmanuel, one of the onboarded students, said, “I feel so happy for the CBN coming here. I had issues trying to carry out international transactions but now I found eNaira. Onboarding was a bit stressful because of my Gmail account but this was resolved.
She encouraged other students to tap into this grace, because “eNaira is a grace of God sent to us from the CBN.”
