How we research a guide

Where we look first — the source hierarchy

We work strictly top-down through a source hierarchy. A claim is only as strong as the best source behind it.

1. Tier 1 — primary government sources. The relevant Nigerian agency's own portal (NIS, NIMC, NIBSS, CAC, FIRS, JAMB, NYSC, FRSC and others), official gazettes, regulator circulars and published fee schedules. Fees, deadlines and legal requirements must trace back to a Tier 1 source.
2. Tier 2 — official secondary sources. Agency press releases, verified official social accounts, and statements made by named agency officials to reputable outlets.
3. Tier 3 — reputable press. Established Nigerian news organisations, used to date or corroborate an event (for example, a launch date) — never as the sole basis for a fee or a legal rule.
4. Tier 4 — practitioner and community reports. First-hand accounts of how a process behaves in practice. We use these to describe real-world timing and friction, and we label them as experience, not rule.

How we resolve conflicting sources

Sources disagree often — a portal lags a fee change, a news report rounds a number, an old circular is still cached. When they conflict:

• The higher tier wins. A live portal beats a news report.
• The more recent source wins within the same tier, provided the date is verifiable.
• Where a genuine conflict remains unresolved, we say so on the page and give the reader both figures with their sources, rather than picking one silently.
• For anything that costs money or has a deadline, we tell the reader to confirm on the official portal before acting. That instruction is deliberate, not a disclaimer reflex.

How we date-stamp pages

Every guide carries two distinct dates, and they mean different things:

• Updated — the last time the content was edited in any substantive way.
• Reviewed — the last time the page was checked against its sources end-to-end. A page can be reviewed without being edited (we confirmed it is still correct) and edited without a full re-review (a small fix). We surface both so the distinction is visible.

How we re-review

Guides are not write-once. We re-check them on a rolling cadence weighted by risk: money pages (fees, penalties) and YMYL identity topics (passport, NIN, BVN, banking) are re-reviewed most often; stable explainer and comparison pages less often. We also bring a rewrite forward whenever an agency announces a change — a new fee schedule, a portal migration, a policy reversal.

The facts registry

Volatile figures — fees, statutory timelines, official portal URLs — are not retyped into each article. They live once in a central facts registry, and articles reference them by key. When a guide shows the line “Facts verified against the NigeriaHowTo facts registry”, it means the fees and figures on that page are drawn from this single shared source rather than hand-keyed.

The benefit is consistency and speed: when a fee changes, we update it in one place and every guide that cites it reflects the new value, so two guides can never silently disagree on the same number. Each fact is tied to the primary source it came from.

What we will not do

• We do not invent fees, statistics, dates or credentials. Where a figure is a range or is uncertain, we say so.
• We do not present a process as universal when it varies by office or state — we describe the variation.
• We do not collect NIN, BVN, passport, bank or card details. No page on this site should ever ask for them.

Related

See the editorial policy for our standards on independence, authorship and conflict of interest, and the corrections page for how we fix mistakes.