The World Bank says the main reason anti-poverty programmes in Nigeria deliver so little is simple: nobody is talking to anybody else.
Lire Ersado, the Bank’s Nigeria Country Director, made the point yesterday in Abuja while launching the One Humanitarian–One Poverty Response System (OHOPRS).
He said officials often work at cross-purposes because they run parallel, unconnected systems. “I now get why so much effort produces so little impact,” Ersado told the audience. “We are not coordinated. We hunt for the same poor households in separate silos, design benefits in isolation, and monitor results without sharing data. Instead of stacking up, our programmes sometimes collide.”
The new platform the minister is rolling out, he argued, should end the duplication. “Nigeria already owns one of the world’s largest social registries—over 90 million households, 40 per cent of all families—and one of Africa’s most advanced digital-payment setups. The pieces are there; we just need to link them.”
He added that nearly every major cash-transfer scheme in the country is still bank-rolled by donors. “That needs to change. Nigeria should run its own flagship safety-net programme—anchored in a single social registry and ID system—so it can pivot quickly between humanitarian relief and longer-term development support.”
Bernard Doro, Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, agreed with the diagnosis and said the government is already fixing it. The OHOPRS, he explained, is designed to lift 50 million Nigerians out of multidimensional poverty by stitching together all welfare databases, targeting rules and payment pipes into one platform.
