FG, NIMC launch digital cards to assist farmers, others

Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security (FMAFR) and the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) have introduced digital identity cards with multiple wallets to assist farmers and other Nigerians.

According to NIMC, the development was in tandem with the National Identity Number (NIN) enabled farmer registry and the Government to People (G2P) card initiative.

NIMC said the project was designed to address the Federal Ministry’s immediate challenges of identity and authentication required in delivering government services efficiently and accurately.

According to a document jointly signed by the Director of Information at the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Dr Joel Oruche, and the Head of Corporate Communications for NIMC, Dr Kayode Adegoke, and made available to journalists, yesterday, the initiatives aligned “with the government’s commitment to improving transparency, efficiency and ensuring inclusivity under the President’s Renewed Hope Agenda, of which food security is a primary objective.

“It aims to eradicate the challenges faced by FMAFS in efficiently delivering well-intended government programmes to the targeted citizens.”

Speaking on the benefits, the ministry and NIMC, said by adopting the card, FMAFS could identify all farmers, provide multiple agricultural services through the card in a manner that would eliminate risks and fraud, and also provide end-to-end visibility within the agricultural value chain, thus enabling scalability.

At the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to create a database for farmers in Abuja, yesterday, the Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Abubakar Kyari, explained that in the first three months, which is the pilot phase, NIMC would identify and capture the biometrics of two million farmers with plans to scale up to six million farmers in the second phase.

The minister said that to reach rural farmers, NIMC would partner with the private sector and utilise its offices in every local government across the country, disclosing that financially inclusive cards would be provided to farmers for various functionalities.

He said: “We are going to use the platform that NIMC has, that is to say, the National Identity Number (NIN), and also the card, which will contain all the biometric information of the individual farmer.”

In her remarks, the Director General of NIMC said: “NIMC has its processes for ensuring that we register the farmers because we have to capture their biometric information.”

“We have offices in every local government across the country, and we also have state offices in every state.”