The support exists. Cash transfers, subsidies, health coverage, food programs. The problem is almost never that the money or the program is missing. The problem is that the systems around it do not connect.
Think about what has to happen for support to reach one person. One institution knows who they are. Another decides whether they qualify. A third delivers the benefit. In most cases these are three different agencies, and they do not share a common way to check each other's records.
So the gaps open up at the seams. A person who qualifies is never enrolled because their record sits in one system and the program runs off another. The same person is asked to prove the same thing over and over, at each new office. Duplicate payments go out because no two lists can be reconciled. Names stay on a roll long after they should have come off. Frontline staff spend their days matching spreadsheets by hand.
None of this is a failure of effort. It is a failure of coordination. The records are mostly there. They just cannot talk to each other.
A coordination problem, not a collection problem
The usual instinct is to build one more database. Collect everyone again, into a bigger system that finally has all the answers. We think that is the wrong move. It is slow, it is expensive, and it asks institutions to give up control of data they are responsible for.
We are working on something narrower. A simple layer that lets one agency ask another a single, tightly scoped question. Does this person qualify under this program? And get an answer, without either side having to hand over its full database.
That design choice matters most for the people with the least room to manoeuvre. When the systems do not connect, the person who loses out is the one who cannot easily travel to a second office, produce a third document, or follow up a fourth time. Closing the seams is, in practice, a way of reaching them.
How we are approaching it
The same way we approach every project. With the agencies, not around them. We start by listening to the people who run these programs day to day, because they already know where the breakdowns are. We build with tools that fit the way institutions already work. And we hand over to internal champions who can keep it running after we leave.
This is early work, and we will share more as it develops. For now the point is simple. Social protection in Nigeria does not fail because the country lacks programs. It fails at the joins. That is where we are focused.