By Doyin Ojosipe
The Spaces for Change (Spaces4C), in collaboration with the Special Control Unit for Money Laundering (SCUML), has organised a one-day sensitization workshop on risk assessment of Non-Profit Organisations in Nigeria.
The activity which took place on Tuesday 16 November, 2021 in Abuja, follows the inauguration of a nationwide risk assessment of NPOs by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in November 15, 2021, in Abuja.
Director SCUML, Daniel Isei, said the assessment was in a bid to understand the complexity of the issue of insecurity in the country.
He said that the risk assessment would not only help to properly classify and regulate the activities of NPOs in the country, but would also help to improve compliance with relevant international, regional and domestic laws/regulations.
Isei said the assessment was expected to help enhance coordination and collaboration between government regulatory/law agencies and the civic space.
The exercise became imperative in a bid to unearth terrorism financing in Nigeria especially with regards to the operations of Boko-haram, Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) and a host of others that have noticeably impacted the country’s security negatively.
Victoria Ibezim-Ohaeri, the executive director, Spaces4C, said the issues of insecurity kept evolving, hence the risk assessment, adding that the emergence of technology had made it worse.
She said that every country needed the risk assessment register to make room for better policy formulation and effective actions to tackle the issues at stake.
Noting that discussions of the exercise were initiated in 2016, Ohaeri stated that the light was only beamed on NPOs to ascertain which of the organisations was a risk and high-risk NPO that might be involved in funding and or encouraging terrorism activities in Nigeria.
She added that her organisation and SCUML had included the NPOs to ensure transparency and implementation of recommendations made from findings.
