The Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, and Poverty Alleviation held its inaugural National Council in Calabar, the Cross River Capital, between 27-29th January, where Commissioners of 36 states and the FCT convened to chart new policy directions for the sector. The maiden Council was held under the direction of new Minister, Dr. Bernard Doro, who assumed office, officially, on 11th November 2025 with a pledge to work to uplift Nigerians living below the poverty line.
The Federal Executive Council’s 2025 approval of a standing National Council for the Ministry was welcomed by the entire humanitarian assistance and poverty reduction community in Nigeria as a vote of confidence and policy reset for a Ministry rocked by the crisis with the suspension of its former Minister.
To set the course for a new bottom-up, Ministry coordinated direction, the Minister invited strategic stakeholders, including donors; relevant Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) at national and state levels; and civil society organizations to submit Memoranda to the Council. The dRPC, having an established partnership with the Ministry, was one of the strategic partners invited to submit a Memo to the Council. Of the numerous Memos submitted at the Council, only a few received approvals and would move forward to shape the Ministry’s coordinated policy direction for the coming years. The dRPC’s Memo, titled “One Humanitarian, One Poverty Reduction, One Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) System” was one of the few Memos receiving approval.
Immediately following the Calabar Council the Minister began the process of aligning the Approved Memos into a unified, coordinated and consistent policy direction for the Ministry. The unified direction would include all sectors within humanitarian affairs and poverty reduction such as education, especially girls’ education, social protection, nutrition, water and sanitation and other related sectors. To take this process forward, the Minister’s team called the dRPC for an in-person meeting on Tuesday, 10th February 2026, I had the pleasure of leading the dRPC senior management team at this meeting.
From a civil society perspective and having led past dRPC delegations on similar missions in the past, the meeting was inspiring and unusual as meetings with Federal Ministers go. To start with, it was clear that the Minister came to the meeting, well informed, having studied the dRPC’s concept note, seemingly in detail. In the discussions, which followed, the Minister knew the granular details of the concept note and made strategic recommendations for strengthening our approach. During the meeting, the Minister also spoke in technical input-output terms about public resource deployed to humanitarian assistance and poverty reduction programs as against outcomes and impact amongst Nigeria’s population living in situations of complex humanitarian emergencies and multidimensional poverty. This perspective of the Minister was a fresh, challenging and resonated well for us the dRPC. The dRPC’s concept notes emphasized an integrated and multi-sectoral approach to monitoring and evaluation, across all humanitarian assistance and poverty reduction interventions, calling for bi-directional indicators to track how crisis impacts poverty and the converse. Our concept aimed to replicate the working model and learnings from dRPC’s past experiences were working with the Ministry of Economic Planning and Budgeting, where we developed a multisectoral M&E Framework on Women’s Economic Empowerment Policies in 2023, which contributed to the development of the National M&E Policy.
As the dRPC sets out on this journey of supporting the Ministry in this specific and important area of integrated, bi-directional and multi-sectoral M&E, we are hopeful and excited by the Minister’s commitment and leadership, positioning M&E as a strategic management and public accountability tool.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/one-humanitarian-poverty-reduction-monitoring-me-system-walker-4nhue
