By Charles Asiegbu & Uchenna Ossai
In July 2023, the National Economic Council (NEC), comprising State Governors and the Vice President of Nigeria, opted to replace the present National Social Register with a new one. NEC cited a lack of credibility as the reason for discarding it. The council also claimed that the register is riddled with inconsistencies, and the process of its compilation is unclear. Other claims included that it was impossible to transfer money to the poorest of the poor digitally, the vast majority of whom are unbankable. Some governors noted that the cash transfer beneficiaries could not be identified in the villages. As a result, state governments were charged with creating new social registers in their respective states.
Discussions on the social register became prominent following President Bola Tinubu’s decision to use the $800 million World Bank loan to ease the suffering of the poorest households caused by the removal of the petrol subsidy. The president’s idea, which has been halted, was to provide ₦8,000 per month for six months to 12 million impoverished and vulnerable households. While some Nigerians oppose the concept for various reasons, others genuinely wonder how people in need will be identified and how monetary transfers will be sent to the designated recipients and not diverted elsewhere.
Contrary to claims by the National Executive Council, the World Bank maintained that the National Social Register was developed by aggregating all State Social Registers from the 36 states and Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja. According to them, each state government built their registers through Budget and Planning Ministries. These registers were forwarded to the Federal Government, which adopted them for its National Social Investment Programmes, particularly the Conditional Cash Transfers component.
The World Bank’s position is set against the backdrop of its support for the Federal Government of Nigeria in implementing the National Social Safety Nets Project (NASSP). Their assistance aimed to provide poor and vulnerable households access to targeted transfers through two components of the expanded national social safety nets system.
Also, some stakeholders have faulted the government’s move to discard the existing social register. Civil society organisations (CSOs) serving as Third-Party Monitors (TPM) for the National Social Safety Net Programme (NASSP) recently recommended that the Nigerian government at both the federal and state levels jettison the plan to abandon the National Social Register (NSR). They claim that it will be detrimental to the country’s progress. They noted that the United Nations, World Bank, and other development partners invested huge resources towards creating the register and ensuring it is credible.
Nextier Policy Weekly analyses the contentious National Social Register and its consequences for the poor and vulnerable. It explores the Social Register concept, its evolution, its purpose in Nigeria, and its usefulness in poverty reduction interventions.
WHAT IS A SOCIAL REGISTER?
A social register aids in outreach, intake, registration, and establishing probable eligibility for one or more social services. They serve a social policy function as inclusion systems and an operational function as information systems. Some social registers function as a platform for dynamic inclusion when registration is open and continuous. This dynamism is inextricably linked to the human rights agenda and the progressive realisation of universal social protection, in which anyone needing social protection can access it at any moment.
Many countries provide various social benefits and services to their citizens to fulfil their socio-economic demands. Social programmes may include cash transfers (conditional or unconditional), in-kind benefits, social support for children, youth, parents, or the elderly, and labour and activation programmes. A social register contributes to the initial stage of this supply chain by assisting in the outreach, targeting, and registration of potential beneficiaries based on an agreed-upon set of eligibility criteria.
EVOLUTION OF NIGERIA’S NATIONAL SOCIAL REGISTER
The National Social Register (NSR) is an inventory of low-income and vulnerable households qualified for various social protection initiatives, including cash transfers, school meals, health insurance, and skill development. In 2016, the government designed and created the National Social Register of the Poor and Vulnerable. The social register contains information on 12.8 million poor and vulnerable households, 50 million people, and 150,000 communities in 752 local government areas. With the NSR, many agencies and stakeholders will be able to more easily coordinate and harmonise their efforts to target, enrol, and monitor the recipients of social programs. Four targeting mechanisms were adopted, and they include:
*Geographic Targeting: The starting point for identifying people with low incomes and the vulnerable in each State is the Nigeria Living Standards Survey (NLSS) conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). The NLSS contains comprehensive socio-economic and demographic data and is used by the state teams to identify the areas with high incidences of poverty in each state. This mechanism included classifying, rating, and selecting participating LGAs using a poverty map across states to provide a basis for the classification.
*Community Ranking: Under this targeting method, the most impoverished communities and households in a local government area (LGA) are given priority in terms of entry and coverage. The ranking of poverty incidence and subsequent selection of communities is supported scientifically by the availability of a few basic facilities and services.
*Community-Based Targeting: This is a process of delegating decision-making responsibilities to community members about identifying poor and vulnerable households (PVHH). Using the agreed-upon criteria, community members identify impoverished and vulnerable households. The Community-Based Targeting Team (CBTT), which consists of Targeting Officers and Enumerators, facilitates this work. The Targeting Officers are in charge of enabling the identification of PVHHs in the community, while the enumerators are in charge of collecting data on the identified PVHHs.
*Proxy Means Test: This approach involves ranking households from poor to poorest based on pre-determined criteria for targeted interventions. This combination of targeting tools aims to ensure that interventions are only directed at the poorest communities, use community knowledge to reach the poorest households within the selected communities, reduce exclusion errors, and use a PMT to verify beneficiary selection at the household level to reduce inclusion errors.
THE RAPID RESPONSE REGISTER
In partnership with the World Bank, the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development initiated and decentralised the National Social Safety-Nets Program (NASSP) to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and ensure improved livelihood.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, most social protection beneficiaries in Nigeria were rural low-income people. However, after the pandemic hit in February 2020, a new group of vulnerable populations at risk of poverty that had not previously been included in the social register emerged. These are particularly urban informal workers who lost their jobs due to business closures and travel restrictions. Given the emerging trend, the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development developed the Rapid Response Register (RRR) through NASSCO with the assistance of the World Bank to identify, register, and assist them.
POVERTY AND SOCIAL INTERVENTIONS IN NIGERIA
According to a 2022 Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) report, 63 per cent of Nigerians (or 133 million people) are multidimensionally poor. The National MPI is 0.257, meaning impoverished people in Nigeria face slightly more than one-quarter of all conceivable deprivation. The North has 65 per cent of the impoverished (about 86 million people), whereas the South has 35 per cent (almost 47 million). Poverty levels vary greatly across states, with the frequency of multidimensional poverty ranging from 27 per cent in Ondo, the least, to 91 per cent in Sokoto, which is the poorest state in the country.
In addressing Nigeria’s history of poverty, successive administrations have implemented a variety of interventions to reduce poverty. Some of the programmes include:
National Accelerated Food Production Programme (NAFPP) 1972 – 1973.
Operation Feed the Nation (1976 – 1980).
Green Revolution Programme (GRP) (1981 – 1983).
Go Back to Land Programme (1983 – 1985).
Directorate of Foods, Roads and Rural Infrastructures (1986- 1993)
National Agricultural Land Development Authority (1991 to 1999)
Presidential Initiatives on selected commodities: Cassava, Rice, Cocoa, Vegetable oil, Livestock, and Fisheries (1999 to 2007)
The then Muhammadu Buhari-led administration created the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development with a mandate to alleviate poverty. For example, the government trained and engaged 1.5 million youths nationwide in the N-Power programme. The Government Enterprise Empowerment Program (GEEP) provided soft loans for 2.6 million beneficiaries, while under the National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP), about 9.8 million school children received one meal daily across Nigeria. Two million poor and vulnerable households benefited from the Conditional Cash Transfer Programme.
THE IMPLICATION OF THE CONTENTIOUS REGISTER ON THE POOR
While the government and key partners have varying opinions on the National Social Register (NSR), the controversy is bound to impact the poor and vulnerable negatively. Several MDAs, development and implementing partners can access the database to execute pro-poor actions. For example, many European Union-funded programs use the NSR database. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UN Women also mine the register to implement programs. Discarding this register may halt or harm pro-poor efforts. The timetable for building new subnational registrations is yet to be determined. As a result, the poor and vulnerable may have to wait indefinitely for assistance.
The laborious process needed in the creation of social registers required to create social registries may slow down its use for interventions. For example, as part of the prerequisites for creating the now-discontinued Social Register, state governments embraced the arduous process of establishing a State Operations Coordinating Office (SOCU) within the State Ministry of Planning. They were tasked to appoint personnel with the necessary credentials for data collection, such as statistics, monitoring, and gender. Following the approach specified in the guidelines, State and local government officials were trained as enumerators and began direct involvement with the selected poorest neighbourhoods.
Nigeria relied on the assistance and support of development partners like the World Bank to develop the discarded Social Register. The World Bank’s confidence in the register suggests that it may be unlikely to assist state governments in constructing a new registration. As a result, state governments, which may lack the resources to develop these social registers, will be disadvantaged and unable to leverage any data for social interventions.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Rather than discarding the existing register, efforts should be made to review and revise the NSR methodology to ensure it is objective, transparent, inclusive and participatory. Various methods, such as self-targeting and categorical targeting, can capture different dimensions of poverty and vulnerability.
There is a need to put in place system-strengthening mechanisms to boost the National Social Register (NSR). Relevant stakeholders can adapt support activities to strengthen the NSR system with mechanisms for interoperability with humanitarian relief and health insurance. Social protection partners’ capacity-building activities could complement this to guarantee the implementation and monitoring of shock-sensitive, gender-transformative, disability-inclusive social protection systems and programmes.
The NSR data should be updated frequently and thoroughly to reflect the emerging reality and circumstances of poor and vulnerable households and capture the new poor while removing households that may have escaped poverty. Existing Third-Party Monitoring groups should be strengthened and supported to evaluate and upscale efforts. The Third-Party Monitoring will ensure that data is continually gathered and analysed to inform routine decision-making by the managers and implementers of social protection programmes. It will also help provide an independent perspective on NSR performance.
The government and stakeholders should make the NSR data accessible to the public. They can publicise the NSR data in a user-friendly format both online and offline, and if there are data protection concerns, organisations or individuals who require the data should be subjected to ethical procedures to gain access to them.
POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
The Nigerian government should channel efforts into reviewing and revising the NSR methodology to ensure it is objective, transparent, inclusive and participatory.
There is a need to put in place system-strengthening mechanisms to boost the National Social Register (NSR)
The NSR data should be updated frequently and thoroughly to reflect the emerging reality and circumstances of poor and vulnerable households and capture the new poor while removing households that may have escaped poverty.
The government and stakeholders should make the NSR data accessible to the public.
CONCLUSION
Nigeria’s contentious social register highlights the complexities of developing a social register while emphasising the necessity for the participation of relevant stakeholders in articulating poverty reduction strategies. To have a real impact on the lives of the poor and vulnerable, the Nigerian government and relevant stakeholders must collaborate to address transparency issues, encourage equitable data gathering, and ensure the participation of excluded groups. An inclusive and well-governed social register can potentially improve the living conditions of the most disadvantaged.
* (Charles Asiegbu is Senior Policy and Research Analyst at Nextier and Bridge Fellow, Nigeria Economic Summit Group; while Uchenna Ossai is International Development Professional and Social Development Consultant)
