National Armoury Visibility Platform
Objective
Building Nigeria’s first centralised national armoury visibility platform for real-time weapons oversight.
Obstacle
Weapon storage, transfers, and civilian firearms records were fragmented across paper systems, disconnected databases, and multiple custodial authorities.
Outcome
A scalable national data platform combining geospatial mapping, governance dashboards, and operational reporting.
Background
The Nigerian government agency responsible for monitoring small arms and weapons required a modern national reporting platform capable of centralising armoury oversight, improving compliance visibility, and laying the groundwork for future weapons traceability. Working against a rapid proof-of-concept deadline, 173tech designed a scalable geospatial intelligence and governance reporting system that consolidated operational data across thousands of armoury locations, multiple custodial authorities, and future civilian firearms workflows into a single national visibility layer.
Challenges
Fragmented National Infrastructure: The project required consolidating armoury data from military, police, air force, navy, dealers, and civilian institutions into a single reporting layer. Each organisation stored information differently, with inconsistent naming conventions, varying operational classifications, and limited interoperability between systems. Without a unified data model, national oversight was impossible.
High-Stakes Operational Visibility: The platform needed to support real-world operational workflows, including monitoring weapons movement, tracking custodial responsibility, and identifying gaps in national coverage. The system also had to scale to support thousands of daily submissions while remaining usable for non-technical government stakeholders.
Solution
National Geospatial Dashboard Infrastructure: 173tech designed and implemented a centralised reporting architecture using PostgreSQL, BigQuery, and Metabase to support national-scale operational visibility. A geospatial dashboard mapped armoury locations across Nigeria, with filtering by state, custodial authority, armoury category, and operational status to provide central oversight of weapons infrastructure.
Governance & Data Modelling Layer: A dedicated modelling layer was created to standardise operational records, custodial classifications, and location metadata before surfacing data into dashboards. This enabled validation workflows for missing GPS coordinates, incomplete operational statuses, and unverified records while creating consistent reporting structures across multiple agencies.
Operational Reporting & Compliance Monitoring: 173tech built a suite of governance dashboards covering stockpile oversight, custodial distribution, national coverage analysis, and compliance monitoring. The platform enabled stakeholders to identify states with missing data, monitor verification gaps, analyse armoury density, and track operational readiness across the country from a single reporting environment.
Impact
National Oversight at Scale: ONSA can now monitor thousands of armoury locations through a single centralised interface instead of relying on fragmented spreadsheets and manual reporting processes. Decision-makers have a unified national view of custodial infrastructure for the first time.
Faster Compliance & Verification Workflows: By surfacing incomplete records, missing GPS data, and operational gaps automatically, the platform dramatically reduces the manual effort required to validate and audit armoury infrastructure. Teams can prioritise investigations and compliance reviews based on live operational data.
Foundation for National Weapons Traceability: The platform creates the operational foundation for future weapons tracking workflows, including civilian firearms registration, transfer monitoring, recovery reporting, and end-to-end auditability. This transforms the project from a static reporting system into long-term national security infrastructure.
Creating Value For ONSA...
4,000+ armoury locations mapped nationally
Up to 2000 operational records processed daily,
And a national geospatial visibility layer delivered as proof of concept
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