The Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST) has launched a digital postcode system that assigns buildings across the country a unique location code — the agency's latest effort to fix Nigeria's long-running addressing problem, and by no means its first.

NIPOST rolled out the National Digital Alphanumeric Postcode on Oct. 1, attaching an 11-character, geographic information system (GIS)-enabled code to addressable buildings. Announcing the launch, Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy Dr. Bosun Tijani said, “Every Nigerian deserves to be found.”

Four decades of earlier fixes

The new system follows four decades of attempts to bring order to Nigerian addresses. The six-digit postcodes introduced in 1986 identified broad postal areas rather than individual buildings — the difference between a code that points to a neighborhood and one that ends at a specific door, which where deliveries, navigation and identity verification ultimately have to land.

In 2017, NIPOST partnered with the UK company What3Words, which divides the world into 3-meter-by-3-meter squares. That initiative set out to lift home delivery from about 20% to 70% within two years, and to 90% by 2020.

The same year, NIPOST also unveiled the Address Verification System (AVS). It won a World Summit on the Information Society Prize in March 2018, and the agency formally launched it in August alongside the Digital Addressing System (DAS), which Technext reported was meant to give every house in Nigeria a unique digital address.

In 2020, NIPOST and the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) agreed to verify addresses provided during SIM registration. Two years later, the agency signed an agreement with the National Population Commission (NPC) to roll out digital postcodes. NIPOST promised a digital postcode by June 2023, but that deadline passed; it ran a pilot in Abuja within the same year.

None of these earlier efforts produced a nationwide, building-level addressing layer. Technext asked in April 2023 why NIPOST needed a new postcode when the AVS and DAS already existed. Public records reviewed for this story do not clearly explain why each effort fell short.

The new system

The Federal Executive Council approved the GIS-enabled system in March 2026. NIPOST says it builds on the NPC's mapping data from the 2022 census rather than mapping the country afresh. Earlier reports state that it was pilot-tested in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and a dozen states.

NIPOST said it expected to capture more than 90% of the country by launch, starting with larger cities. Full coverage of the 36 states and the FCT is targeted for December 2026.

Early users have reported mixed results, with some finding accurate codes while others struggled to identify their buildings. NIPOST says errors can be reported and corrected within 48 hours.

The measure of this attempt will be whether NIPOST's own timelines hold: the December 2026 target for all 36 states and the FCT, and the 48-hour correction window that early users are already putting to the test.

This article is based on reporting by TechNext24.