Agora Policy delivers digital information for informed public oversight
Last Thursday in Abuja, policymakers and members of the civil society gathered for the unveiling of two critical platforms by Agora Policy: The ‘Policy Registry’ and the ‘Local Governance Accountability (LGA) portal’. The digital platforms, developed with support from MacArthur Foundation, are geared towards giving the Nigerian public relevant tools to become more active players in the policy space themselves and to hold policymakers to account.
While we commend Agora Policy for the initiative, we must remind the public that Nigeria’s governance deficit is not solely a product of bad leadership. It is also a product of bad information–the kind of structural opacity that makes it nearly impossible for citizens to know what their governments are doing, the amount of money each tier generates both from Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) and Internally Generated Revenues (IGR) and who is responsible for what.
The two portals (accessible at www.lgaportal.org and www.policyregistry.org) represent a serious attempt to shift the terms of civic engagement in Nigeria. Together, they address different layers of the same problem: that public information, which should be freely accessible, has historically been scattered, gatekept, or simply unavailable. The LGA Portal is the more urgent of the two, and for good reason. This is the tier of government responsible for primary healthcare, basic education, local infrastructure, sanitation, and rural development, but it has long operated without any meaningful public oversight. And it remains the least effective.
The LGA portal has set out to provide a single, searchable repository of the allocations by Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) to all 774 local government areas from May 1999 to date, tracking over ₦3.88 trillion across more than 322 months of data. For instance, a resident of Ibeju-Lekki or Kumbotso can now look up exactly how much money their local council received in any given month over the past two decades and compare it with neighbouring councils. A journalist investigating corruption in a particular LGA can pull historical allocation data in minutes rather than filing freedom of information requests that may never be answered. A civil society organisation monitoring local governance can use the portal’s visualisation tools to identify patterns such as councils that consistently receive high allocations but show little development or structural funding gaps that explain why certain communities lag behind. Community leaders and members can use the data to have informed discussions with local officials about local needs and priorities.
Beyond financial data, the portal also aggregates LGA profiles, land mass, population figures, headquarters locations, date of creation, and the names and party affiliations of elected officials. This last feature matters more than it may first appear. One of the reasons local government officials operate with impunity is that most Nigerians cannot name their chairpersons and councillors, let alone hold them accountable. A platform that makes this information available in a standardised, searchable format is a prerequisite for any meaningful community-level accountability.
The Policy Registry addresses a different but related gap. Nigeria’s policy landscape suffers from fragmentation: laws, regulations, executive orders, and sector-specific policy documents are scattered across official websites, gazette archives, and private collections, with no single authoritative source. The registry consolidates these documents, spanning sectors from petroleum to health to agriculture, into one searchable, downloadable database. For researchers, analysts, journalists, and even policymakers themselves, this reduces the time and cost of policy work considerably.
What Agora Policy and its partners have done with these platforms is to bring further legibility to the policy landscape in Nigeria and to further empower citizens and civic groups with additional tools to hold duty bearers to account. The next step is to ensure that civil society, the media, and citizens actually use these platforms and use them well to bring about meaningful changes in the Nigerian society.