NAN-HE-19
Technology
By Lucy Nwachukwu
Abuja, Oct. 11, 2016 (NAN) The National Cooperative Financing Agency of Nigeria (CFAN) said it had begun a Unified Cooperative Platform (UCP) to meet the operational needs of cooperative societies in the country.
The Executive Secretary, CFAN, Mr Emmanuel Atama, said this while addressing newsmen on Tuesday in Abuja.
Atama said the planned implementation programme would enlist over 200 cooperatives in the first phase, adding that this would commence with the north central states, including the FCT.
“Each Geopolitical zone of Nigeria will have over 40 cooperatives on board with the use of UCP by December while we scale up to 50 per zone in a quarter by 2017.
“ The UCP, with support of the Inter-Bank Settlement Scheme, will help achieve the role of cooperative in the financial inclusion drive by the year 2020.
“It will help to make our current drive for inclusive pension, healthcare, housing and others very easy and accountable on the part of collating the contributions from teaming members and remittance.
“ It will also serve as a bedrock upon which the much desired National Development Fund is anchored and enable government and development partners to ascertain the level of cooperative contribution to the economy.
He said,“ the Unified Cooperative Platform was launched on Feb. 2, through a collaborative effort by the then Acting Federal Director of Cooperatives, Mr John Musa and CWG Plc.
“The essence is to provide standardised cooperative technologically driven platform that would meet the operational eeds of the cooperative societies in Nigeria.
“The innovation serves as a one stop shop for all technology needs of cooperative societies, it solves issues of accountability, productivity, monitoring and reporting needs of every cooperative society.
“It is meant to connect cooperatives to the apex body for the purpose of ascertaining their contributions to the overall growth of the economy.
“This will also enable government and development partners understand the level of support they should extend to cooperative activities in Nigeria.
According to Atama, the platform offers a robust cooperative banking platform that supports financial and banking services and collaboration between the various state cooperatives and the apex body.
He said the platform enjoyed the expertise of CWG Plc, the largest IT services company in Nigeria, with years of experience in building shared IT platform.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the CFAN is the apex cooperative financial institution in Nigeria, established under the Cooperative Societies Act 2004 CAP 98 LFN.
The UCP is a core cooperative banking solution that enables cooperative societies to manage their members general ledgers, perform daily posting, mange loans and generate different types of reports.
It also has the facility that ensured data upload and migration from analogue to digital ways of data management in the UCP with real time access grant to the UCP by CFAN.(NAN)
LCN/GOM/IA
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(Edited by Gregory Mmaduakolam/Idris Abdulrahman)