NSITF’s digital revolution attracting international attention

• As fund emerges regional benchmark in workers’ compensation

By Victor Ahiuma-Young

The ongoing transformation of the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund, NSITF, is steadily positioning the agency as a reference point for social security administration in West Africa, with its digital reforms and improved workers’ compensation system drawing attention from neighbouring countries seeking to strengthen their own institutions.

What was once largely viewed as a domestic reform effort has evolved into a regional success story. 

The latest indication of this growing recognition came with the visit of a high-powered delegation from the Industrial Injuries Compensation Fund of The Gambia’s Social Security and Housing Finance Corporation, SSHFC, which chose Nigeria as its preferred destination for a knowledge-sharing mission on workplace injury compensation and social insurance administration.

The significance of the visit was not lost on the Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr. Muhammadu Maigari Dingyadi, who described the occasion as evidence of the growing confidence in Nigeria’s social insurance system.

Receiving the Gambian delegation, led by the Managing Director of NSITF, Oluwaseun Faleye, the minister commended the reforms introduced at the Fund, describing them as transformative.

Represented by the Permanent Secretary of the ministry, Dr. Kamil Shoretire, Dingyadi welcomed the delegation’s decision to understudy Nigeria’s experience.

He said the visitors had come to “interact and understudy our social insurance trust fund, ably led by Mr. Faleye, who has been doing tremendous work with the administration of the Employees’ Compensation Scheme.

“Our compensation mechanism has improved, and a lot of digitization is happening now to ensure that claims are attended to as soon as possible, while a lot of transformation has been going on in the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund.”

The remarks point to one of the most visible outcomes of the ongoing reforms – faster claims processing, greater operational efficiency and improved access to compensation for workers injured in the course of their employment.

Beyond the technological transformation, Dingyadi stressed the importance of cross-border collaboration among African social security institutions.

According to him, “It is very important that the two countries exchange ideas on how to improve the lives of their citizens, particularly the working subsets of the population that those agencies primarily support, and also by extension, giving government the much-needed impetus to be able to attend to the needs of the large majority of the population.

“Our own is an ongoing process. We have not reached where we want to be. And we also want to see what Gambia has been able to do, so that our fund too will be able to scale up the best practices you’re going to share with us,” the minister added.

That spirit of mutual learning was echoed by NSITF Managing Director, Oluwaseun Faleye, who said the partnership between the two institutions had been developing for some time.

According to him, “This exchange of ideas and collaboration has been in the making for a long time, and that’s why when we received the request from the Gambian Social Security Institution to visit Nigeria for this engagement, we readily accepted.

“We accepted because we felt that our demographics, our background and dynamics are somewhat similar. We are, even though we’re a much larger country, but when we look at the demographics in terms of the formal market population, or look at the young age groups that you’ll find in these countries, we have similarities across West Africa, indeed across Africa.

 “Even if our institutions may differ, the issues that we deal with are similar, and we think that learning from each other will be very, very critical in dealing with the challenges that we both face in our respective countries.”

The current engagement, he explained, is a follow-up to the International Social Security Association (ISSA) workshop hosted by NSITF earlier this year, which brought together social security institutions from across the sub-region.

He said: “It was a follow-up to that we had this request from Gambia to come for a few days to really see how we deal with achieving our mandate on a day-to-day basis, and we are glad that they made the time to come.

“We had our first session today where our internal teams from the respective departments have gone to the nitty-gritty of how we carry out our services. I’m hoping that in the next day or two they’ll learn much more about how we do things.

“We don’t see this as learning from us alone; the interaction that we’ve been having also demonstrates to us the peculiarities of their own situations and how we can learn from that.

“We felt that it was important to bring them here because we wanted to show that the labour ecosystem is united; this ministry is a supervising ministry; they articulate the policies, which we then seek to do.”

Earlier, while welcoming the delegation to the Fund’s headquarters, Faleye emphasised the importance of collaboration on occupational safety and worker protection.

“It’s important we share ideas on safety and hazards at the workplace and how to protect our workers. We hope to visit you in the future to interact with you on your operations. On behalf of the NSITF Board, it’s our honour and privilege to have you here.”

Perhaps the strongest endorsement of NSITF’s transformation came from the leader of the Gambian delegation, Pierre Gomez, who revealed that this was not his first encounter with the Nigerian institution.

“This is not our first time coming to NSITF. We’ve been here before. NSITF and Nigeria is our big brother and that is why we are coming back to our big brother on knowledge sharing and we can share a lot of experience together.

“I’m very pleased with the transformation I’ve seen so far. I think I was here about a decade ago, and I’ve seen a lot of changes happen, so it is imperative to come back and get that information or that knowledge from Nigeria, take it back and share with our colleagues back home.”

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