Image courtesy of World Bank presentation – ‘Towards Universal Digital Identification for Nigeria’

The Director General/CEO, National Identity Management Commission, Engr. Aliyu Aziz has made it known that the new ecosystem will commence from June 2018.

The new Identity Ecosystem is a sustainable system where any of the data collecting Government agencies or licensed private agency can enroll and capture data from Citizens and legal residents and send to the NIMC backend.
Engr. Aziz said “Right now we have over 30million records in our database. With the ecosystem, NIMC plans to capture additional 50 million records this year.”

The Ecosystem will be solely funded by the World Bank, European Union (EU) and Agence Française de Développement (AFD), a French developmental agency.

It should be recalled that President Muhammadu Buhari on 21st December 2015 gave a directive for all Government agencies collecting demographic and biometric data of citizens and legal residents, to harmonize their data into a single database, to be housed and managed by the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC).

“Most of the agencies that collect data do so for their own unique functions but they are duplicating in the sense that the they are buying equipment for biometrics including the Automated Biometrics Identification System (ABIS), which checks all the finger prints, face and the iris to determine the person is unique and it is the most expensive part of the system.” Aziz said.

To prevent Duplication of functions and curtail wastage, the Federal Government mandated NIMC to harmonize the data of all these agencies, in essence NIMC provides the foundational identity while they provide functional identity.
“We came up with regulations that expand and are very clear that for every Government service you must provide a NIN and that it should be linked to civic registration (birth and death registration) to ensure retirement of the NIN to sweep out the dead in the database.” Aziz said.

NIMC is going to use neutral technology to ensure there is no vendor lockout in the system that usually happens with this type of project.

He also noted that database security was of upmost importance in the project “We are building a trustworthy system with the legal, technical and security sectors to ensure there is data protection and privacy.” Aziz assured.

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