Communications Minister, Bosun Tijani has named Milsat Technologies, a Nigerian geospatial company, as the firm behind the technology powering the country’s new National Digital Postcode system, days after the federal government rolled out the platform.

Tijani made the disclosure on Tuesday in a post on X, crediting the company’s founders, Taslim Saluadeen and Adedamola Baderinwa.

The system was officially launched on Thursday, October 1, and was developed with the Nigerian Postal Service, NIPOST. It assigns an 11 character digital postcode to every addressable building in the country, and residents can look up their codes on postcode.gov.ng.

Unlike the old numeric system of six digits, which covers broader areas, the new postcode points to a specific building. The minister has stressed that it identifies a building and not the person living in it.

Milsat’s role comes after it helped the National Population Commission map more than 65 million properties ahead of Nigeria’s first digital census. The company has described its work as building locally developed tools for collecting and interpreting geographic data across Africa.

The Federal Executive Council approved the GIS enabled postcode system in March this year as part of Nigeria’s digital public infrastructure.

Government officials say it will improve emergency response, logistics, e-commerce, security operations and the delivery of public services. Tijani has also tied the project to President Bola Tinubu’s ambition of building a $1 trillion economy.

Questions remain, however. Reports in the tech press note that neither the ministry nor NIPOST has published the total cost of the national mapping contract, or how many structures had actually been captured at launch, particularly in rural communities.