The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), International Labour Organisation (ILO) and European Union (EU) have canvassed the need for stronger coordination of social protection data to improve policy planning and service delivery in Nigeria.
The partners made the call in Abuja on Tuesday at the ‘National Social Protection Statistics Dialogue and Data Collection Engagement’ forum jointly organised by them in Abuja
Speaking at the forum, the Statistician-General of the Federation, Prince Adeyemi Adeniran, said the dialogue was particularly important as Nigeria’s social protection landscape is current undergoing significant transition, with the government taking steps to strengthen national ownership, coordination, financing and delivery of social protection and poverty-reduction interventions.
Noting that the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction is advancing a more integrated approach in social data protection through its “One Humanitarian, One Poverty Response System”, Adeniran explained that the initiative was aimed at moving the country away from fragmented interventions towards a more coordinated national social protection architecture.
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He said that as part of the statistics agency’s statutory mandate, it had a responsibility to ensure that the reforms and programmes undertaken by the government were supported by reliable, timely, comparable and disaggregated data.
He clarified: “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”, the Statistician-General added.
According to him, the NBS has made progress, through the support of the ILO and EU, in strengthening technical capacity, harmonising social protection data and engaging institutions responsible for implementing social protection programmes.
Adeniran further hinted that work was also ongoing to establish a Social Protection Management Information System (SPMIS) to help bring together data currently held by different ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) and make them available in a coordinated and harmonised form for national and sub-national statistical production.
To ensure a fully integrated social data collation and protection in the country, the NBS’ boss maintained 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.
Adeniran also called for stronger coordination of social protection data at the sub-national level, particularly at the ward level, adding that “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 the NBS’s recent ward demarcation exercise provided an important statistical foundation for understanding development conditions at a more disaggregated level, pointing out, however, the objective of the exercise is not to create a new large-scale survey for every social protection programme in every ward.
The Statistician-General explained said the statistics agency 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.
Delivering her address at the forum, Nigeria Country Director of ILO, Vanessa Phala, described the engagement as desirable for building resilient, reliable and evidence-based data for social protection interventions in the country.
Phala explained that effective policy decisions could not be based on assumptions, hence the need for reliable data to inform interventions and track progress as social protection remained a fundamental human right and a pillar of decent work and social justice.
In his remarks, the EU Head of Section, Human Development, Ben Mathew, who was represented by Chioma Osuji, said the EU viewed the engagement as part of a continuing collaboration efforts rather than a one-off event.
Mathew commended the NBS and the ILO for organizing the forum at a time when strengthening social protection had become increasingly important to inclusive development, social cohesion and resilience.
Noting that data remains the most important tool for development, human development expert maintained that “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.”
