For years, finding an address across much of Nigeria has depended far less on a number than on a description. A visitor might be directed to a street, told to look for a distinctive building, instructed to turn at a familiar shop, or advised to keep walking until reaching a landmark tree. Delivery riders often know a neighbourhood intimately yet still struggle to identify the correct front gate. Across the country, the gap between arriving in a community and reaching a specific doorway remains considerable.
Nigeria’s new digital postcode system is designed to narrow that gap. Launched on October 1, 2026, it moves beyond the traditional postcode, which identifies a broad area, to assign codes at the level of individual buildings or delivery units. The ambition is to make it possible to identify a particular building with greater precision, whether it is in a busy city, a developing suburb or a rural community.
But the system is more than a new set of numbers and letters. Behind it is an attempt to build a national location-data infrastructure: a system that can collect information about buildings, verify it, update it as places change and make it useful to government agencies, businesses and ordinary Nigerians.
For Taslim Salaudeen, Milsat’s chief executive and co-founder, the project is about something bigger than giving building codes.
“The clear answer is that we are not another addressing company. We are a location-data infrastructure company,” he said. “Our job, or our holistic mission, is to unlock the location-data gap that exists in African developing countries like Nigeria.”
That distinction helps explain how the company became involved in a national postal project, why it spent years developing mapping technology and what it believes the new postcode system could eventually make possible.
From paper maps to usable data
Milsat’s involvement in the project grew out of its earlier work on mapping and data collection. The company’s central argument is that many African countries have information about their people, buildings and communities, but too often that information is collected in ways that make it difficult to reuse.
Data may be gathered manually, recorded on paper or stored in systems that cannot easily be updated or shared. A government agency might complete a mapping exercise for a particular purpose, only for the information to become difficult for another institution to access or apply.
Salaudeen said Milsat was established in 2017 to address that wider problem. Location data, he explained, can support far more than postal delivery. It can help governments map populations, plan public services and identify where children live in rural communities so vaccination programmes can reach them. It can also help businesses understand where customers are, organise deliveries and make decisions based on geography.
“Location address is just one type of location service,” he said, pointing to the company’s work in census mapping, mapping children in rural areas for vaccine delivery and postcode systems.
Before such technology became available, he said, many data-collection exercises were conducted “manually, on paper and pen, on paper maps”. The information could not easily be reused, distributed or accessed by other organisations.
The problem, in his view, was the absence of infrastructure designed around the realities of African geography and communities. Milsat wanted to build tools that would allow organisations to collect information, manage it and make it useful beyond the original project.
“So this is why we believe the first step to fixing data unavailability or data inaccessibility in Nigeria particularly is first to build the infrastructure that can allow Nigerians or Africans to collect data the way it is meant to be collected, operate it the way it is meant to be operated and distribute it towards people that really need it,” he said.
The postcode system is one of the most visible applications of that ambition.
Milsat’s relationship with NIPOST began towards the end of 2021, according to Salaudeen. The company had been recommended to the postal service after work it carried out with the National Population Commission (NPC) on mapping buildings and other features for census-related activities.
Salaudeen said Milsat’s technology supported the mapping of more than 65 million buildings, alongside roads and points of interest. That figure is his account of the earlier mapping work, not a count of buildings that have all received postcodes.
The recommendation brought Milsat into discussions with NIPOST, which had been trying to develop a national addressing system for years. Salaudeen said the postal service already had a policy framework and a concept for what the country’s postcode system should look like. The challenge was turning those plans into something that could function in the real world.
“Our job then was to see the theoretical component that they wrote, their wishes, and then, as a technical partner, transform that into a practical, functional system,” he said.
A system built before the national rollout
To demonstrate that the proposed system could work, Milsat participated in a pilot in one or two local government areas in Abuja. Salaudeen could not recall precisely which areas during the interview.
The pilot was a joint effort involving NIPOST and other agencies. Salaudeen said Milsat contributed technology, training and operational support, with some of the work carried out at its own expense. The company saw the exercise as an investment in a national infrastructure project it believed was important.
“We did a pilot to prove that we know what we are saying and we know what we are promising,” he said.
He described the exercise as a collective effort, with different agencies contributing to its success. Milsat took responsibility for the technology and training, while also covering some operational costs.
The pilot demonstrated that the government’s postcode concept could be translated into a working system. Users could query a postcode, retrieve it and associate it with a particular location.
“The pilot was proving that from theory to reality,” Salaudeen said.
The path from pilot to national launch was not immediate. There were changes in leadership and the usual complications of government projects. There was also the question of how to finance and organise the work at national scale.
Salaudeen said Milsat had developed much of the underlying technology before the national project was formally approved. That preparation, he argued, helped explain the speed of the eventual rollout. The company was not starting from scratch when the opportunity to deploy the system across Nigeria emerged.
He also offered an account of how the national project was organised. According to him, Milsat was not the company that directly secured the main project contract. He identified MEED Network as the company involved in securing the contract and said the two companies subsequently collaborated, with Milsat contributing its location-data technology and technical expertise.
Salaudeen was candid about the distinction between developing technology and navigating the process of securing a government contract. “We don’t really envy bidding; we envy delivery,” he said, explaining that Milsat preferred to concentrate on what it knew how to do.
He described the eventual arrangement as an example of organisations recognising their different strengths and working together. Once the partners aligned, they could build on technology that had already been tested.
“We were prepared even before anything was sealed,” he said. The partners were able to configure and deploy the system quickly because the technology had already been developed and tested at earlier stages.
What a postcode now identifies
The biggest change is the level of detail.
Nigeria’s older postcode system used numerical codes that generally pointed to an area or district. A postcode could identify a broad part of a city, but it did not necessarily tell a delivery service which building to visit.
The new system is designed to go further. Its structure moves through several geographical levels, from state to local government area, district and area, before identifying an individual building or delivery unit.
Salaudeen said the shift reflects a wider movement towards building-level addressing. While older systems in many countries identify regions or areas, the new approach is intended to take the code down to the individual unit.
“So it starts from state, LGA, district, area and unit, with unit being your home or your house or delivery unit,” he explained.
That final level is important. A code is no longer intended only to say that a parcel belongs somewhere in a neighbourhood. It is meant to identify the particular structure where the parcel should be delivered.
Adedamola Baderinwa, who also participated in the interview, explained part of the system’s geographical logic. An area can contain a maximum of 99 buildings, while a district can contain up to 400 areas. In places where buildings are spread out, and there are fewer than 99 within a defined space, the model also takes geographical coverage into account. Baderinwa said an area could be based on roughly two hectares where the building count is lower.
The aim is to make the system work in places with very different patterns of development. A densely built part of Lagos may contain many buildings close together. In a less densely populated part of the country, buildings may be separated by large stretches of land. A system based only on the number of buildings could treat those places unevenly.
The new model attempts to account for both.
It also defines a building in practical terms. For NIPOST, a unit is a place where a delivery can be made: a structure where a postal worker can arrive, knock on the door, and leave a parcel. If a compound contains three separate standing buildings, each can have its own unit code.
“A unit is a standing structure,” Salaudeen said. “So if you have three standing buildings in a compound, they have independent unit codes.”
That definition has consequences for what the system includes. A temporary kiosk, construction shelter, or movable structure may not qualify as an addressable building, even if someone is staying there. Salaudeen said NIPOST applies a standard definition of a delivery unit, rather than treating every temporary structure as a permanent address.
The distinction is important in a country where people live in a wide range of housing arrangements. It also points to one of the system’s limits: a postcode database built for postal delivery will not necessarily describe every place where people live or work.
Mapping Nigeria as it is
Building a national addressing system presents a challenge that is not solved by importing mapping technology developed elsewhere.
Nigeria’s geography and settlement patterns vary widely. In some places, buildings are arranged along planned streets. In others, they emerge gradually, with roads and houses developing in ways that do not follow a formal layout. Communities may be organised around waterways, informal paths or landmarks that residents know well but that are difficult to represent through conventional mapping systems.
Salaudeen said Milsat had to build its technology with these differences in mind. He described communities where people live in houses along rivers, in caves or in structures that might not fit a narrow Western definition of a conventional building.
“In the desert, you see white domes; in river areas, you see houses on the river; in the East, you see people in caves,” he said. “These are places where people reside and live and call their homes.”
The company’s earlier field experience, he said, helped it understand how housing and settlement patterns differ across the country. The challenge was to create one system that could recognise those differences while still operating according to consistent standards.
Baderinwa pointed to another example: household structures in parts of northern Nigeria. A family may be spread across several buildings, with members living in separate structures but sharing food from the same pot. A mapping system designed around the assumption that one household occupies one building could misunderstand that arrangement.
These details may appear small, but they matter when location data is used for planning, service delivery, or population-related work. A system that misreads how people live can produce information that looks precise on a map but does not accurately reflect life on the ground.
For Milsat, the answer was to build technology that could accommodate local realities without abandoning international standards.
“Our technology adapts to culture while maintaining global standards,” Salaudeen said. “We have global standards and a solution that works in our local culture.”
He said much of the technology used to operate the postcode system was developed locally. Satellite imagery is integrated into the company’s field-mapping application, helping teams compare what they see on the ground with geographical information and confirm whether the mapping model fits a particular location.
The technology also provides tools for validating information, checking data quality, and managing updates. Human fieldwork remains part of the process. Satellite imagery can help identify structures and geographical features, but it does not remove the need for people to confirm what exists in a community.
Salaudeen described the wider technology as an operating system for data, allowing organisations to collect, verify, distribute and govern information rather than leave it sitting unused in storage.
A postcode that must keep changing
A national postcode system cannot be treated as a project that ends when the software is launched. Buildings are constructed, demolished, divided and modified. New settlements emerge, and existing communities expand.
The system is designed to accept updates from different sources. A resident or property owner may submit a request or suggest a change. Government agencies may contribute information from their own records, including data generated through building-permit processes. NIPOST’s postcode department is responsible for reviewing submissions and approving changes.
Where there is uncertainty, officials can arrange for information to be checked on the ground, Salaudeen said.
He described the process as one in which different information pipelines feed into a central system, but submissions still pass through data-quality checks before they are approved.
This is particularly important because the existing mapping data is not complete or permanent. Salaudeen said the earlier census-related work provided a substantial starting point, but new buildings have appeared since that exercise. He estimated that almost 50 million buildings were already represented in the postcode database, while acknowledging that the number would continue to grow. The figure was provided by the company’s executives and was not independently verified in the interview.
Rather than beginning with an empty map, NIPOST is building on information that had already been collected. Residents whose buildings are missing can request a postcode, allowing the database to expand as new locations are identified.
Salaudeen stressed that the system should not be judged as though it were a one-time mapping exercise. “Postcode is not something where we say we have finished,” he said. “It is a continuous growth because people keep on building houses.”
For Milsat, the longer-term ambition is to make the database one of the richest sources of location information about Nigeria. Baderinwa said the company hoped it would reach that point within five years.
Reaching people beyond smartphones
A digital postcode system is only useful if people can access it. That raises a practical question in a country where not everyone owns a smartphone, has reliable internet access or is comfortable navigating a digital map.
Salaudeen said the partners viewed public access as a continuing process rather than something solved by launching a website or application. The system may allow a person to find a postcode online, but the company is also considering ways to make the information available through organisations and services that already collect people’s addresses.
Banks, hospitals, public health centres, utilities and other institutions could become points through which people discover their postcodes. A customer who has previously provided a home address to a bank or hospital might eventually be able to receive the corresponding postcode through that institution.
The company also discussed working with local representatives who could visit communities and help residents identify their codes. In some rural areas, printed lists or gazetted postcode information may be more practical than asking people to navigate a digital interface.
Salaudeen said the partners were exploring whether telecommunications networks could help people retrieve their postcodes through text messages or USSD, services that do not require a smartphone. These were possibilities under consideration, not capabilities he said were already fully available.
His position is that technology should not become a barrier to receiving the service.
“We are a diverse country. Every layer of development requires a different strategy in disseminating information,” he said. “We will meet you where your knowledge is, just to deliver the same result: knowing a precise postcode.”
What businesses can do with it
The system is also intended to become infrastructure for businesses that depend on accurate location information.
A logistics company, for example, could use building-level postcodes to organise deliveries more efficiently. A financial institution could improve the way it records customer addresses. Other businesses could use the information to plan services, identify customers or connect their own data to precise locations.
To encourage adoption, the partners have opened a route for businesses to integrate the postcode system into their own products. Baderinwa said companies could visit dashboard.postcode.gov.ng, create an account, complete a know-your-business verification process and request access to the application programming interface, or API. A sandbox environment allows developers to test how the system works before using it in their services.
He said about 700 companies had registered at the time of the interview, although that figure was not independently verified. Larger organisations with more complex requirements can seek additional integration support.
Salaudeen said Milsat’s role is not simply to deliver a database and walk away. It wants to help agencies and businesses keep their data operational, updated and useful over time.
He described this as turning data into an asset: information that can be maintained and used by different organisations rather than left unused after a project ends.
“Our business model is making a big enterprise or a government agency sustainable by operating their dataset,” he said. “We make data an asset for any agency or business. We make it operable, make it living, and connect it to the sectors or enterprises that can use it for their daily activities.”
The reported cost of the national project was below ₦8 billion, according to Salaudeen. He said the financing covered a range of requirements, including field equipment, software deployment and infrastructure for NIPOST. He did not provide a detailed breakdown of the spending or specify how much Milsat itself earned from the project.
For now, the more difficult test is whether the system can remain accurate, accessible, and useful as Nigeria changes. A postcode that points to a building that no longer exists, or fails to include a new settlement, will quickly lose value. A database that residents cannot access will struggle to become part of everyday life. And businesses will have little reason to integrate it if the information cannot be trusted.
The launch has provided Nigeria with a new way to identify buildings. Keeping that system alive will require continued fieldwork, reliable oversight, cooperation between public institutions and private companies, and participation from the people whose homes and businesses it is meant to locate.
Salaudeen’s larger argument is that the postcode is only the beginning. The infrastructure being built around it could support other forms of location-based services, from public planning to commercial delivery and data management.
That is a bigger ambition than giving every building a code. It is an effort to make the places where Nigerians live and work easier to identify, describe, and connect to the services that depend on knowing exactly where they are.
The real measure of the system, then, will not be how quickly it was launched. It will be whether it can keep finding Nigeria as Nigeria keeps building itself.