The Nigeria Digital Identification for Development (NDID4D) project has agreed to collaborate with the National Orientation Agency (NOA) as it plans to begin pilot identity enrolment in the FCT and six states representing the geopolitical zones in the country in February 2023.
The agreement was sealed yesterday, following a courtesy visit by the national coordinator of the NDID4D, Mr Solomon Odole and some members of his team to the NOA headquarters to see the director general, Dr Dauda Abari.
Earlier, Odole had told the DG and members of his management team that the project needed NOA to be able to scale its awareness creation and sensitisation activities in the six Area Councils in the FCT given NOA’s mandate of reaching all nooks and crannies of the country.
He reiterated the project’s overarching goal of increasing the number of persons in the country having a NIN and upgrading infrastructure at the National Identity Management Commission so as to be able to enrol in marginalised and hard-to-reach communities up to no fewer than 250 million persons during the project’s life cycle.
Abari commended the project coordinator for all the good work he had been doing in the project, saying that NOA had been involved in digital identification and NIMC, especially given the fact that data identification and capture was very necessary in any economy as the world had become digitally driven.
He commended the performance of NIMC in attaining over 90 million enrolees, adding that NOA was proud to be part of the commission’s success story.
’’We trained our staff in the states and have created a data capture centre (in NOA’s headquarters) to serve people at the old Secretariat and a nearby market,’’ he said.
The NOA DG pledged to commit to the partnership with the NDID4D and looked forward to its pilot enrolment programme in 2023 to which it can deploy mobile vans equipped with jingles in different languages, to sensitise communities, markets, places of worship and palaces.
He added that NOA was also amenable to signing an MoU with the project to seal the partnership, promising that the Agency would work with the project on the MoU that would boost the enrolment figures and ensure that no one was left behind.
The NDID4D coordinator was accompanied on the visit by Chief (Dr) Emmanuel Akogun (the project’s M&E specialist), Mal. Mouktar Adamu (the external communication manager), Ibrahim Salifu (the project’s Change manager) and Mrs Helen Ekeh, the Stakeholder Engagement manager,
Mouktar M. Adamu manager, External Communication NDID4D.
