Plans are already in motion to unlock the untapped potentials inherent in the Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST) as 300, 000 agents would be engaged directly to drive financial inclusiveness in the country, according to the Federal Ministry of Communications Technology Progress Report on Projects & Programmes Implementation obtained by BusinessDay.
The report however said that the ministry, the NIPOST, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), in conjunction with the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (ICRC) and the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) have embarked on a project geared towards leveraging the country’s postal network to deliver financial services to unserved and underserved areas. The scheme will deepen financial inclusion in under-served areas traditionally marginalised by banks, and considered as places with people living at the “bottom of the pyramid”.
To achieve the aim, the federal government through its public-private partnership initiative is reshaping NIPOST composition with the strategic objective of establishing a vast network of over 300,000 agents all across Nigeria. In the report which covered July 2011 to February 2014, the Ministry disclosed government’s interest to reach the rural dweller, pointing out that postal outlets have relatively good presence in the 774 Local Government Areas and consequently can contribute substantially to bringing financial services nearer to the rural population. Whilst 32 percent of Nigerians live or work between five and fifteen minutes of a bank branch, the rest 61 percent live or work between five to fifteen minutes of a post office.
Sola Bickersteth, director, One Network, said, in a recent report, that “In a short while, the public will begin to feel the impact of the scheme, because we would have moved to the streets and begin full scale operations.
The scheme will start will 50,000 trained officers to be dispatched to 1,200 NIPOST outlets across the country”. Bickersteth said that “It is just like in Banking; the chief executives are people with impeccable character and grounded in the professional ethics.
Agent banking is such a scheme that requires competent people who will make the right decisions. One Network is an industry-focused organisation, recognised by the apex bank as agent manager, providing agent locations for mobile money operators across the country. Financial inclusion in Nigeria, for instance, is still at its low ebb. For instance, in 2012, only 28.6 million out of total of 87.9 million Nigerian adults had access to financial services and most unbanked people live in the rural areas. One reason stakeholders identified as causative of the plight was unavailability of bank branches to potential customers.
Ben Uzor Jr
