The Federal Government has ratified a preliminary framework to establish a modern, digitised national addressing system to resolve the long-standing challenge of imprecise location data across the country.
The initiative, coordinated through the National Addressing Council (NAC), will integrate the operational capacities of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), and the Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST).
The framework aims to move Nigeria away from its fragmented system of street naming and numbering toward a structured digital format that provides unique identifiers for every physical location.
Under the new arrangement, the NAC will serve as the central coordinating body to ensure that the three agencies align their data sets. NIPOST will provide the geographical and postal expertise, NIMC will link addresses to the National Identification Number (NIN), and the CAC will ensure that registered businesses have verifiable physical locations.
This integration is designed to eliminate the reliance on descriptive directions—often referred to as “landmark-based addressing”—which has historically hampered the efficiency of courier services and emergency response systems.
Logistics Efficiency and Corporate Governance
The lack of a reliable addressing system has imposed a significant “last-mile” cost on Nigerian businesses. E-commerce platforms and logistics firms frequently struggle with delivery failures or extended transit times because addresses are often vague or non-existent.
By implementing a digital address system, the government expects to reduce the operational costs for SMEs and large-scale distributors by streamlining delivery routes and improving the accuracy of destination data.
For the Corporate Affairs Commission, the system provides a mechanism to verify the existence of registered offices. This is intended to reduce the prevalence of “shell companies” and fraudulent business registrations that use non-existent or shared addresses to evade regulation.
Financial institutions are also expected to benefit from the rollout. A digitised address system enhances the Know Your Customer (KYC) process, allowing banks to verify a customer’s physical residence with higher precision, which in turn reduces the risk of credit fraud and improves loan recovery efforts.
Beyond commercial utility, the system is intended to support the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) and state internal revenue services in identifying taxable properties and businesses more accurately.
The project follows similar digital transformation efforts seen in other African nations, such as Ghana, which implemented a digital address system to boost its postal efficiency and urban planning.
The National Addressing Council is now expected to move from the framework stage to the implementation phase, which will involve mapping urban and rural areas in phases.
Current efforts focus on creating a unified database where a single digital code can be linked to a person’s identity, a business’s registration, and a physical coordinate on a map.
The next stage of the rollout will involve the technical integration of the NIPOST database with the NIMC biometric system to ensure that address updates are reflected in real-time across government registries.
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