The Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF) has partnered with the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) to integrate National Identification Number (NIN)-based verification into the Employees’ Compensation Scheme (ECS), aimed at improving access and accountability across the country’s workforce.
During a high-level meeting at NIMC’s headquarters, Oluwaseun Faleye, Managing Director of NSITF, led a delegation to engage with Engineer Abisoye Coker-Odusote, Director General of NIMC, to formalise the collaboration focused on identity validation for workers enrolled under ECS.
Faleye says the initiative seeks to harmonise identity data and strengthen operational efficiency, particularly for verifying workers’ eligibility and delivering benefits under the compensation scheme.
“This collaboration will help bring sanity to the identity sector. Nobody can be registered to the scheme except they are registered and captured under NIN,” Faleye says. “Today in Nigeria, to get a passport your NIN must be verified. So we must adopt the same measure to seamlessly get adequate and accurate data of all employees under the scheme.”
“This collaboration will help bring sanity to the identity sector. Nobody can be registered to the scheme except they are registered and captured under NIN,” Faleye says. “Today in Nigeria, to get a passport your NIN must be verified. So we must adopt the same measure to seamlessly get adequate and accurate data of all employees under the scheme.”
NIN: Data integration to drive scheme efficiency
Faleye highlights that leveraging NIMC’s national identity infrastructure enables NSITF to streamline service delivery and align with broader social protection objectives. He adds that access to nationwide demographic data will guide data-driven decisions to refine ECS implementation.
“The Employees’ Compensation Scheme is designed to provide compensation for employees who have suffered injuries, death, or disabilities as a result of work. Very crucial to that service is identity verification and the data management relating to identity verification,” he says.
Faleye also calls for the integration of service systems across public agencies to ensure that identity verification supports the delivery of social security services and other national development goals.
“If the data management entity does not collaborate to ensure that different service providers are able to access that data and allow citizens to use it in a way that improves their lives, it won’t make a difference,” he explains.
According to him, the partnership also presents an opportunity to advance data inclusion and technological integration through coordinated advocacy efforts.
NIMC to begin immediate technical integration
Responding, Coker-Odusote, Director General of NIMC, welcomes the collaboration and assures of the Commission’s full commitment to enabling the integration process.
“We understand that the need is very critical to enabling access to services across the board. This is all we do on a daily basis, so we will definitely hand the IT team over to our own IT group for them to collaborate and form a working group together,” she says.
She adds that NIMC will set a timeline to guide technical implementation and proposes a future press briefing to announce key milestones of the collaboration.
“I will set a timeline for us to ensure that proper integration is done from a week to date and then we can definitely add this to each of our achievements,” Coker-Odusote says.
The NSITF-NIMC partnership marks a significant step in Nigeria’s efforts to strengthen the use of digital identity for targeted delivery of social protection programmes and improve national data interoperability frameworks, according to the government agencies.
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