The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), International Labour Organisation (ILO) and European Union (EU) have called for stronger coordination of social protection data to improve policy planning and service delivery in Nigeria.

The stakeholders made the call in Abuja on Tuesday at the National Social Protection Statistics Dialogue and Data Collection Engagement organised by the ILO in collaboration with the NBS, EU and UNICEF.

The Statistician-General of the Federation, Semiu Adeniran, said the dialogue was particularly important as Nigeria’s social protection landscape was undergoing significant transition.

Mr Adeniran said the government was taking steps to strengthen national ownership, coordination, financing and delivery of social protection and poverty-reduction interventions.

He said the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction was also advancing a more integrated approach through its “One Humanitarian, One Poverty Response System.”

According to him, the initiative is aimed at moving the country away from fragmented interventions towards a more coordinated national social protection architecture.

He said the NBS had a responsibility to ensure that the reforms and programmes undertaken by the government were supported by reliable, timely, comparable and disaggregated data.

“Our role at NBS is to help ensure that as Nigeria strengthens its social protection architecture, we also strengthen the evidence architecture.

“This will enable the government to know what is working, who is being reached, where the gaps are and how the system is performing over time,” he said.

Mr Adeniran said the NBS had made progress, through collaboration with the ILO and EU, in strengthening technical capacity, harmonising social protection data and engaging institutions responsible for implementing social protection programmes.

He said work was also ongoing to establish a Social Protection Management Information System (SPMIS).

The statistician-general said the initiative would help bring together data currently held by different institutions and make it available in a coordinated and harmonised form for national and sub-national statistical production.

He identified Abia, Benue, Oyo and Sokoto states as the four states involved in the ILO-supported SUSE programme.

Mr Adeniran said Nigeria must move beyond treating social protection data as occasional reporting and establish sustainable systems, standards, institutional arrangements and data flows for regular statistical production.

He said the engagement should result in a clearer understanding of the data gaps affecting the reporting of the indicator, the institutions holding relevant information and practical steps required to address the gaps.

Mr Adeniran also called for stronger coordination of social protection data at the sub-national level, particularly at the ward level.

He said the NBS’s recent ward demarcation exercise provided an important statistical foundation for understanding development conditions at a more disaggregated level.

“If development planning is increasingly taking place at the ward level, our social protection statistics must also start to tell us what is happening at the ward level,” he said.

He, however, clarified that the objective was not to create a new large-scale survey for every social protection programme in every ward.

Mr Adeniran said the NBS would explore the development of a ward-level social protection data layer by bringing together information available across government systems and complementing it with targeted statistical data collection.

Also speaking, Country Director, ILO, Vanessa Phala, described the engagement as a milestone in efforts to build resilient, reliable and evidence-based data for social protection interventions.

Ms Phala said effective policy decisions could not be based on assumptions, stressing the need for reliable data to inform interventions and track progress.

She said social protection was a fundamental human right and a pillar of decent work and social justice.

Head of Section, Human Development, Ben Mathew, represented by Chioma Osuji, said the EU viewed the engagement as part of a continuing process rather than a one-off event.

Mr Mathew commended the ILO and NBS for convening the dialogue at a time when strengthening social protection had become increasingly important to inclusive development, social cohesion and resilience.

He said effective social protection systems depended not only on policy commitment but also on strong institutions and credible data.

He stated, “Without data, we cannot do any planning. If we want to reduce poverty and do not know how many people are poor, or the level of their vulnerability, we cannot initiate programmes that will address poverty.” 

(NAN)