The Federal Government has begun work to build a national digital identity and verification system for Nigeria’s cooperative sector, as part of reforms to improve access to finance, strengthen regulation and lay the foundation for the proposed Cooperative Bank of Nigeria.
Minister of State for Agriculture and Food Security and Supervising Minister of Cooperative Affairs, Senator Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi, disclosed this on Tuesday in Abuja at the National Technical Workshop on Cooperative Sector Digitalisation under the Renewed Hope Cooperative Reform and Revamp Programme (RH-CRRP 2030).
Abdullahi said the digitalisation programme would introduce a National Cooperative Smart Registry (NCSR), a Cooperative Verification Number (CVN) and a Cooperative Member Identification Number (CoopID) to provide reliable identification and data for cooperative organisations and their members nationwide.
He explained that the initiative was designed to address longstanding challenges in the sector, including weak governance, inadequate regulation, limited access to finance and markets, institutional capacity gaps and the absence of reliable data.
He noted that the Federal Government cannot effectively support or regulate cooperative organisations without a credible system for identifying and verifying them.
‘We cannot effectively finance what we cannot identify. We cannot properly regulate what we cannot see. We cannot build trust around institutions whose identities and records cannot be reliably verified,’ the minister said.
He added that the country could not establish a modern Cooperative Bank without credible data and identity infrastructure for the cooperative ecosystem it would serve.
Abdullahi stressed that the initiative should not be viewed merely as an Information and Communication Technology project, but as a major economic and institutional reform intended to transform the administration of cooperatives.
‘At the foundation of this transformation is the National Cooperative Smart Registry. Through the NCSR, we are building the infrastructure for cooperative search, registration, verification and digital governance,’ he said.
He explained that the CVN would provide verifiable identities for cooperative organisations, while the CoopID would establish a unique identification framework for individual cooperative members.
The minister said the three digital instruments would strengthen trust, visibility and integrity in the sector, while providing the government with reliable information for planning and economic interventions.
He also said the infrastructure would play a critical role in establishing and operating the proposed Cooperative Bank of Nigeria by supporting share subscription, credit profiling and risk management.
Abdullahi said the government’s vision was to establish a financial institution that would be ‘government-enabled, cooperatively-owned, cooperatively-controlled and professionally managed.’
He disclosed that the Federal Government plans to launch the CoopBank share-subscription programme by the end of October 2026, following ongoing sensitisation and mobilisation of cooperative stakeholders nationwide.
According to him, the Ministerial Advocacy Tour on Cooperative Bank Share Capital Mobilisation, Stakeholder Sensitisation and Cooperative Sector Digitalisation has already covered the South-West, North-West and South-South geopolitical zones.
He said the exercise, which began about three months ago, was launched in Ikeja, Lagos State, for the South-West, followed by Kaduna for the North-West and Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, for the South-South.
The minister said similar engagements would be held in the North-Central, South-East and North-East before the planned October launch of the share-subscription programme.
‘I urge stakeholders in these zones to prepare and mobilise for the advocacy tour. Our message will remain clear: the future of Nigeria’s cooperative movement depends on building strong cooperative financial institutions alongside a trusted, inclusive and interoperable digital ecosystem,’ he said.
Abdullahi also charged State Directors of Cooperatives to take ownership of the digitalisation programme, noting that cooperative matters fall under the concurrent legislative list and therefore require effective collaboration between federal and state governments.
He said the Federal Government could not successfully digitalise the sector from Abuja without the active participation of state cooperative departments, describing the directors as frontline implementers of the reform.
The minister urged them to familiarise themselves with the digital platform, including cooperative registration, search, validation and verification processes, as well as the generation of CVNs and CoopIDs.
He said Seamfix Limited, the technical partner for the initiative, would demonstrate the platform’s end-to-end operations to stakeholders and receive feedback on peculiarities across states.
Abdullahi warned that the digitalisation exercise must go beyond transferring existing manual processes to electronic platforms, insisting that it should result in measurable improvements in cooperative administration.
‘Digitalisation must not simply reproduce our existing manual inefficiencies on a computer screen. It must improve transparency. It must strengthen accountability. It must make cooperative administration easier,’ he said.
He added that the success of the initiative would ultimately be measured by its ability to provide reliable information for policy and planning while delivering tangible benefits to ordinary cooperative members.
The minister called on the Federal Department of Cooperatives, State Directors of Cooperatives, Cooperative Federation of Nigeria, Institute of Cooperative Professionals of Nigeria, Seamfix and other stakeholders to treat implementation of the programme as a shared national responsibility.
In his remarks, Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, Dr Marcus Ogunbiyi, said the partnership between the Cooperative Federation of Nigeria (CFN) and Seamfix Limited to establish a nationwide digital infrastructure for cooperative societies and their members will eliminate fraudulent operators, prevent multiple registrations, improve access to finance and government interventions.
Ogunbiyi noted that cooperatives remain critical to food security, rural economic development and grassroots empowerment, but require modern systems to meet the demands of contemporary commerce and governance.
According to the Permanent Secretary, the programme aligns with President Bola Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda and aims to modernise the cooperative sector, deepen financial inclusion, eliminate fraudulent operators and improve access to capital for smallholder producers and other cooperative members.
The Permanent Secretary added that the partnership would lay the technical foundation for the National Cooperative Smart Registry, which would streamline cooperative searches, registration and digital workflows across federal and state levels