No fewer than 85.2 percent of Nigerians are without effective social protection coverage, leaving the vast majority of the population exposed to poverty, economic shocks and other vulnerabilities, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has said.
The development means only 14.8 percent of Nigerians are effectively covered by social protection, highlighting a major gap in the country’s efforts to protect vulnerable households and workers from economic hardship.
ILO Country Director for Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone and Liaison Office for ECOWAS, Dr Vanessa Phala, disclosed this on Monday in Abuja at the National Social Protection Statistics Dialogue and Data Collection Engagement organised by the ILO, in collaboration with the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), European Union (EU) and UNICEF.
Phala said the 14.8 percent coverage figure represented more than a statistic, stressing that behind it were millions of Nigerians struggling without adequate protection against economic shocks.
‘Effective coverage in Nigeria stands at 14.8 per cent. Behind this figure are real families: mothers, workers in the informal economy, persons with disabilities, and children who remain vulnerable to economic shocks,’ she said.
She said closing the gap required government and stakeholders to move beyond broad estimates and develop a comprehensive statistical system capable of identifying those covered, those excluded and areas where social protection interventions were most urgently required.
Explained that effective policy decisions could not be based on assumptions, noting that reliable, timely and disaggregated data was essential to improving social protection delivery.
Phala said the ILO, through the European Union-funded Supporting Sustainable Social Protection Systems in Nigeria (SUSI) project, was partnering with the NBS to strengthen the generation, coordination and use of social protection statistics.
She said that the initiative, which initially covered Abia, Benue, Oyo and Sokoto states, was being expanded nationwide to the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, with the aim of equipping state statistical institutions to collect, analyse and harmonise social protection data.
She said that stronger sub-national data would enable Nigeria to better understand regional disparities, identify excluded groups and improve reporting on Sustainable Development Goal indicator 1.3.1, which measures the proportion of the population covered by social protection systems.
Phala added the exercise would support the production of a national Social Protection Statistics Bulletin to expose coverage gaps, guide resource allocation and improve interoperability among state registers, the National Social Register and other social management information systems.
‘To transform this reality, policy choices must be grounded in precise, reliable, and timely data.
‘We must equip every state directorate of statistics with the technical tools to gather, analyse, and harmonise social protection data,’ she said.
Also speaking, the Statistician-General of the Federation, Mr Semiu Adeniran, noted that the dialogue was taking place at a time when Nigeria’s social protection landscape was undergoing significant transition.
Adeniran said 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’, aimed at moving the country away from fragmented interventions towards a coordinated national social protection architecture.
According to him, the NBS has a responsibility to ensure that government reforms and programmes are 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 government to know what is working, who is being reached, where the gaps are and how the system is performing over time,’ Adeniran said.
He disclosed that work was ongoing to establish a Social Protection Management Information System (SPMIS) to 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.
Adeniran said Nigeria must stop treating social protection data as occasional reporting and instead establish sustainable systems, standards, institutional arrangements and data flows for regular statistical production.
He called for stronger coordination of social protection data at the sub-national level, particularly at the ward level, noting that 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 conduct a new large-scale survey for every social protection programme in every ward.
Rather, he said the NBS would explore developing a ward-level social protection data layer by bringing together information already available across government systems and complementing it with targeted statistical data collection.
Representing the Head of Human Development at the EU Delegation to Nigeria and ECOWAS, Mr Ben Amor Mathieu, Chioma Osuji said effective social protection planning was impossible without credible data.
She said the EU viewed the engagement as part of a continuing process to strengthen institutions, coordination and data systems rather than a one-off exercise.
‘When we say we want to reduce poverty and we don’t know how many people that are poor, the level of vulnerability, we can hardly come up with programmes that would be able to help us address the reduction of poverty,’ Osuji said.
She added: ‘We cannot build effective and responsive social protection systems without data. High quality, timely and disaggregated data is a very good foundation on which sound policy and effective planning is going to be built.’
Osuji urged participating institutions to establish practical mechanisms for routine data sharing, validation and accountability, rather than treating social protection statistics merely as information produced for reporting purposes.
She also supported the institutionalisation of the proposed Social Protection Statistics Bulletin Committee, saying it could help sustain coordination and ensure that data generated continued to inform policy and government action.
The EU, ILO and UNICEF have continued to support Nigeria’s efforts to strengthen social protection systems, including institutional capacity, integrated management information systems and the extension of coverage to vulnerable groups and workers in the informal economy.