The Inclusion for All initiative, an advocacy non-governmental organization (NGO), has released a research report which showed specific communities and groups that are most likely to be excluded from Nigeria’s identity system.
The report explained how Nigeria’s poorest and most vulnerable communities are less likely to have a means of identification for any economic benefits.
“Women are less likely to have ID at every percentile of the World Bank’s poverty probability index, and the gap widens the poorer the more likely a respondent is to be poor,” the research report showed.
The report also showed the gender gap in ID ownership is considerably more acute for specific categories of women, “with an overall gender gap of 8percent, and a progressively increasing gap as we look at particularly vulnerable groups”.
“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,” Chinasa Collins-Ogbuo – Head of the Inclusion for All Initiative said.
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According to a statement from the NGO, 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.
The most important actions that need to be taken to accelerate access include 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,” a statement from Inclusion for All Initiative said.
Ogbuo noted that the NGO will follow up on some panelists’ recommendations and build a detailed set of recommendations for action that can frame the development of interventions over the coming months.
“We ramp up our support for these communities and work to ensure that these identified groups find a way into the formal economy,” Ogbuo said.
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.
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’.
