The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, Dr. Bernard M. Doro, made this plain during a courtesy visit by the leadership of Enhancing Financial Innovation and Access (EFinA) to the Ministry’s Abuja headquarters, using the occasion to lay out a reform agenda that is as much about fixing government systems as it is about serving the poor. “The problem is not the absence of programmes,”Dr Doro’s position made clear. At the heart of the Ministry’s response is the One Humanitarian and One Poverty Response System an initiative designed to consolidate the patchwork of interventions currently spread across agencies, close accountability gaps, and build the kind of unified data infrastructure that has long eluded Nigeria’s social protection architecture. The Minister was candid: weak data integration, uncoordinated social registers, and duplicated efforts have historically meant that support does not reach the people it is meant for. Dr. Doro also drew a direct line between poverty and insecurity, framing deprivation and unemployment not merely as welfare concerns but as drivers of crime and instability, and therefore a matter of national security. A functioning social protection system, in his view, is not optional. The reforms, he acknowledged, are not without resistance. But the government’s commitment to a technology-driven, accountable system remains firm. EFinA Chief Executive Officer Mrs. Foyinsolami Akinjayeju brought a complementary but pointed perspective to the table. Nigeria’s financial inclusion rate may have climbed to approximately 74 percent buoyed largely by the rapid spread of digital payments but she cautioned against reading that number as a victory. Behind it lies a more troubling reality: most Nigerians remain financially fragile, with stubbornly low uptake of savings products, insurance, pensions, and affordable credit. Women and rural populations bear the sharpest end of these gaps. Her prescription was a strategic pivot, away from counting how many Nigerians have access to financial services, and toward measuring whether that access is actually improving their lives. Stronger Digital Public Infrastructure and tighter coordination among regulators, financial institutions, and development partners, she argued, are prerequisites for that shift. Ene Mary McDickson