Nigeria will begin the first phase of a new digital postcode system in October, assigning every building and location in the country a unique, machine-readable digital address tied to precise map coordinates in place of the descriptive, landmark-based addresses that have long complicated deliveries, identity verification, and emergency response.
Bosun Tijani, Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, disclosed the timeline at a workshop in Abuja organised with the Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST), where officials and representatives of security and emergency response agencies discussed how the new postcode could become a shared framework for coordinating national response and verifying locations.
The National Digital Alphanumeric Postcode System, Tijani wrote on X, is designed so that “every person, business, and location can be accurately identified and connected” within Nigeria’s digital ecosystem.
He described it as one of five defining initiatives from his three years in office, alongside Project BRIDGE, the country’s 90,000-kilometre fibre rollout; the National Universal Communication Access Project, which is extending connectivity to more than 20 million Nigerians through 3,700 telecommunications towers; the Nigeria Data Exchange; and ongoing efforts to build out an artificial intelligence ecosystem.
Two decades of false starts
Nigeria has run a six-digit numeric postcode (Lagos Island’s is 100001) since 1986, but missing street names and house numbers across much of the country have limited its usefulness. A plan to digitise it first surfaced in 2009, under the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, before stalling amid policy and leadership changes in the years that followed.
NIPOST tried smaller fixes instead. In 2017, it partnered with the British startup what3words to simplify how Nigerians described their locations, and the following year, it launched two verification platforms, the Address Verification System and the Digital Addressing System, meant to build a live database of physical addresses. Neither solved the underlying problem, and by 2020, Google’s own Plus Codes had entered the Nigerian market with a similar workaround.
What is different this time
This attempt has moved further than its predecessors.
In March, the Federal Executive Council approved a Geographic Information System (GIS)-enabled version of the postcode, and NIPOST has spent recent months running a delineation model validation exercise, checking aerially mapped postcode boundaries against the realities on the ground (the building density of Lagos’s Mushin neighbourhood, for instance, bears little resemblance to Abuja’s).
October’s rollout will cover a pilot group of states and local governments, not the whole country at once.
Victoria Fakiya – Senior Writer
Techpoint Digest
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NIPOST’s Postmaster General and Chief Executive Officer, Tola Odeyemi, has framed the bigger risk ahead as adoption rather than engineering: implementation, not technology, will determine whether the system succeeds, she said at the workshop, adding that the goal now is to move from awareness to use. Tijani said stakeholder engagement would continue in the months ahead of the official launch.
