Grassroots Addressing and Identity Management Systems has urged the World Bank to adopt digitally validated addresses identification for the disbursement of its $800m loan subsidy palliative for Nigeria.

The Chairman/Founder of Grassroots Addressing and Identity Network Limited, Bisi Adegbuyi, stated this in a letter to the World Bank Country Director in Nigeria, Shubham Chaudhuri.

In a statement, he stated that it was imperative for the implementation process to be driven by a tailored addressing and identity technology to ensure transparency and confidence building.

He said, “One of the conditions precedents for the process to be transparent is that beneficiaries should be assigned duly validated digital addresses and means of identification. This will also engender a real-time feedback mechanism for transparency and accountability.”

Adegbuyi, who is a public administrator and a former postmaster general of Nigeria/chief executive officer of the Nigerian Postal Service, noted that one of the major criticisms of Nigeria’s social intervention programme, enabled by the World Bank’s $500m International Development Association grant in 2016, was the alleged opaqueness of the National Social Register of poor and vulnerable Nigerians.

The statement added that Adegbuyi disclosed that, “Our digital addressing and identity verification systems software, which won the recognition of World Summit on Information Society, an affiliate of International Telecommunications Union, a specialised agency of the United Nations in 2018, can help to provide an end-to-end monitoring tool for the scheme, thereby enhancing its transparency and accountability.”