The Federal Government has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Seamfix Limited and the Cooperative Federation of Nigeria to develop and deploy the National Cooperative Smart Registry, a national digital identity and verification infrastructure that will register, verify, and formally connect Nigeria’s estimated 370,000 cooperative societies and their millions of members across the country.
The MOU was signed in Abuja on 12 August 2026 at a National Technical Workshop on Cooperative Sector Digitalisation, presided over by the Minister of State for Agriculture and Food Security and Supervising Minister of Cooperative Affairs, Senator Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi.
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What the registry does
The infrastructure is built around three interconnected components. The National Cooperative Smart Registry will serve as Nigeria’s single authoritative national platform for verified cooperative information, replacing the fragmented, often manual records that have made Nigeria’s cooperative sector opaque to regulators, lenders, and government agencies. The Cooperative Verification Number will assign each registered cooperative society a unique, verified digital identity. The Cooperative Member Identification Number, known as CoopID, links every individual cooperative member’s verified identity directly to their National Identification Number, extending Nigeria’s existing national ID infrastructure into the cooperative economy for the first time.
Seamfix Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer Frank Atube was direct about the problem the registry addresses: the absence of a unified digital system for cooperative records has left the sector dependent on manual processes, making it significantly harder to identify legitimate beneficiaries, track fund flows, and deliver government interventions to the people and organisations they are designed to reach.
Nigeria has 370,000 registered cooperative societies representing millions of farmers, traders, artisans, and workers who pool resources and savings within their communities. The fact that until now there has been no national digital record of who these societies are or who belongs to them is one of the most significant hidden infrastructure gaps in the country’s financial inclusion story.
Why it matters for financial inclusion and SMEs
Cooperative societies are one of the most important, and most overlooked, financial infrastructure layers in Nigeria’s economy. They mobilise savings, extend credit, provide group purchasing power, and support livelihoods in communities that the formal banking system has not fully reached. Yet their informal records, duplicated registrations, and fragmented regulatory oversight have historically made them invisible to development finance institutions, credit bureaus, and government support programmes.
A digital registry that assigns verified identities to cooperative societies and their members changes that equation. A cooperative whose identity is verified and whose membership records are accessible can access institutional credit, be targeted by agricultural input programmes, and participate in formal procurement processes that informal groups cannot enter. Its members, linked through CoopID to their NINs, become part of the traceable, verifiable financial ecosystem that enables financial inclusion at scale.
The government has also announced the immediate commencement of a six-month National Revalidation and Re-certification Exercise for all existing cooperatives, a process that will clean up the register, remove inactive or fraudulent entities, and ensure that the new digital infrastructure is built on accurate foundational data.
Formalisation through digital identity is not bureaucratic overhead for cooperative societies. It is the mechanism through which 370,000 organisations and their millions of members become visible to the financial system, and visibility is the precondition for access.
