Analysis prepared by the Nigeria Network of NGOs (NNNGO) Regulatory Team
A new bill before the Senate would create a federal commission with sweeping powers to register, audit and sanction every organisation in Nigeria that receives foreign aid — including NGOs and CSOs. On paper, it is about transparency. In practice, it duplicates institutions that already do this work, threatens to reverse a hard-won reform the sector spent a decade securing, and revives a model Nigeria’s own Parliament has rejected four times before.
Here is what the sector needs to know.
What SB.1034 Actually Does
The Foreign Aid (Regulation, Coordination, Transparency and Disclosure) Bill, 2026 (SB. 1034), sponsored by Senator Ibrahim Hassan Dankwambo and passed for second reading on 22 July 2026, would establish a Foreign Aid Regulatory Commission (FARC). Every recipient of foreign aid — federal and state government, NGOs, CSOs and private entities alike — would be required to:
- Register with FARC within 30 days of receiving aid, with non-registration a criminal offence;
- Publicly disclose the source, amount, purpose, conditions and implementing partners of every grant, on a new national register;
- Submit to a mandatory annual independent audit, on top of existing obligations; and
- Align funded projects with government development priorities, enforced through fines of up to ₦20 million and up to five years’ imprisonment.
The stated aim — preventing diversion and misuse of foreign assistance — is legitimate. The design is where the problems start.
Five Things the Sector Should Know
- This is Nigeria’s fourth attempt at an NGO commission — and each of the first three failed
SB.1034 is not a new idea. A dedicated commission to supervise and monitor NGOs was proposed in 2016, 2017 and again in 2019/2020. Each version lapsed at committee stage after sustained advocacy from civil society and the public, on substantially the grounds set out below: registration burdens, criminal sanctions, and unchecked regulatory discretion. SB.1034 revives the same institutional model under a different long title, applied this time to “foreign aid” rather than NGO activity in general. - The register the Bill wants to build already exists — and is already public
Clause 8 of the Bill calls for a new “National Foreign Aid Register.” Nigeria already has one. The Federal Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning operates the Nigeria Development Cooperation Dashboard (ndcd.ng), a live, publicly accessible database built on the international IATI transparency standard. It already tracks aid disbursements by donor — including NGO-channelled funders such as Action Aid, Christian Aid, Catholic Relief Services, Oxfam, Save the Children and Mercy Corps — broken down by sector, by ministry, by National Development Plan pillar, by SDG goal and by state. The dashboard is designed to support government and parliamentary oversight of external finance. A functioning public system already performs most of the transparency functions the Bill proposes.
In other words: the transparency deliverable SB.1034 promises is not a gap to be filled. It is a system that already exists and already works on an internationally recognised standard. - SB.1034 would undo a reform the sector spent nearly a decade winning
This is the point NNNGO’s members will feel most directly. For years, Nigerian NGOs were treated as high-risk “Designated Non-Financial Businesses and Professions” under the anti-money-laundering regime, obliged to register with the EFCC’s Special Control Unit Against Money Laundering (SCUML) and comply with reporting rules designed for pawnbrokers and car dealerships. Following a sector-wide risk assessment led by SCUML from 2022, and the Financial Action Task Force’s November 2023 revision of Recommendation 8 which requires governments to take a targeted, risk-based approach to non-profits rather than blanket regulation Nigeria removed NGOs from that reporting-entity list. At the 3rd Africa High-Level Civil Society AML/CFT Conference in Abuja in July 2026, this was credited to ten years of sustained civil-society advocacy. SB.1034 would reintroduce, through FARC, substantially the same registration, reporting and sanctions burden, just via a different institutional door. This is not duplication. It is regression. - The Bill treats government money and private donations as the same thing — and that is a constitutional and human rights problem, not just a drafting quirk
Government-received foreign aid is public revenue. Under sections 80–89 of the 1999 Constitution, control of public funds sits with the National Assembly, and the Auditor-General for the Federation already has a constitutional mandate to audit how it is spent. A grant from a foundation, a diaspora donor, or an international NGO to an independent Nigerian CSO is a different thing entirely: it is private income, and how an association seeks, receives and uses it is protected as part of the right to freedom of association.
Nigeria has bound itself to that protection twice over. It ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 1993, Article 22 of which the UN’s own Special Rapporteur on freedom of association has interpreted to include the right of associations “to seek, receive and use resources — human, material and financial — from domestic, foreign and international sources.” Nigeria has also domesticated the African Charter on Human and Peoples‘ Rights through the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (Ratification and Enforcement) Act, Cap. A9, giving the Charter’s own protection of associational freedom (Article 10) the force of ordinary Nigerian law — a status the courts have treated as carrying particular weight precisely because it gives domestic effect to an international human rights obligation.SB.1034 does not distinguish between these two categories of money at all. Clause 2 applies a single registration, audit, disclosure and criminal-sanctions regime to federal ministries and to independent CSOs in the same breath. Extending the logic that governs public funds under the Constitution onto private donations to associations is, in effect, treating a constitutionally protected right as if it were merely another line item in the national accounts. That is the constitutional and human rights problem sitting underneath every other issue in this Bill — the duplication, the criminal penalties, and the reversal of the SCUML reform are all downstream symptoms of this one conflation at Clause 2. - NGOs already report— SB.1034 would add more
Nigerian NGOs already register as incorporated trustees with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAMA 2020, Part F) and, as “public interest entities,” already file audited, IFRS-aligned financial statements with the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria, complete with CEO/CFO certification and FRC-imposed sanctions for non-compliance. FARC would be another sanctions regime for the same underlying conduct — the kind of “onerous vetting rules… not applied to the corporate sector” that the African Commission’s own Guidelines on Freedom of Association and Assembly in Africa specifically caution governments against.
What Other Countries Show Us
Nigeria is not choosing between transparency and civic space — other countries have already tested both paths:
- India’s Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act shows the cost of the restrictive model: over 20,700 NGO licences cancelled or lapsed since 2014, and a “partially compliant” rating from the FATF in 2024 on NPO safeguards.
- Kenya’s Public Benefit Organizations Act 2013 shows a workable alternative: transparency and anti-abuse safeguards delivered through a co-regulatory model, with a self-regulating federation of NGOs sharing supervisory responsibility rather than a purely punitive state commission.
What Should Happen Next
This analysis is not an argument against transparency in foreign aid. It is an argument that Nigeria already has the tools to achieve it — and that SB.1034, as drafted, would build a costly, duplicative and legally vulnerable structure on top of them.
Get Involved
NNNGO members with views on SB.1034 are encouraged to engage directly with the Senate Committee on Public Accounts and the House Committee on Civil Society and Development Partners ahead of the Bill’s public-hearing stage.
