The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Umar Farouq on Thursday disclosed that about N400 billion has been provided for the implementation of the National Social Investment Programme (NSIP) and National Home Grown School Feeding Programme in the 2022 Appropriation Act signed into law by President Muhammadu Buhari.
Farouq disclosed this in Abuja, during a media chat at the sideline of the ‘National Social Investment Programmmes Annual Strategic Review Meeting, 2021’.
The Minister who spoke through the NSIP National Coordinator, Dr Umar Bindir said: “The budget for this year for the NSIP is reasonably within the region of 300- 400 billion, most of which is actually recurrent to pay for the N-Power and the School Feeding Programme.
“But we are making a very good case to ensure that we cover more grounds based on Mr President’s approval to expand this ever-popular and social effective programme of engaging the youths and also feeding the children in the schools.
“Poverty is a very complex equation and therefore you just do your best to lift people out of poverty. The focus of the NSIP is trying to ginger the youths to acquire skills and use those skills to engage themselves as entrepreneurs and maybe engage more people so that once you have an income, your life is organised.
“I am happy to report that under the N-Power, we have graduated 500,000 batches A and B and we have a total of one million young people on-boarded and they are doing very well.
“Part of them are those that are teaching, some are working on the farms and parts are working with healthcare sector but we also have non-graduates who are doing skill-based programmes like Carpentry, glazing work, plumbing and so on and so forth.
“But we also have established a large pool of what we call us mobile money agents, those people who provide financial services in rural areas using the POS technology.
“We have also supported establishing the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) centres in secondary schools, public secondary schools, to help young people to be mainstreamed with technology, and so on and so forth. So the programme for N-Power is doing very well.
“On the Conditional Cash Transfer, we have more than 10 million applicants all nationwide, but we have successfully managed to onboard 2 million, and we’re consistently paying these households at N5,000 per month, and this is household with an average number of five to seven people per household.
“And then the School Feeding, we are feeding an average of 10 million children nationwide. By the end of 2021, there were only two states that were not on-boarded, Kwara and Bayelsa but I’m happy to report that they are now aligned, so we are nationwide.
“And then certainly the GEEP which is the government enterprise and empowerment programme with the softest loans that you know on earth, we are allowing women under the market money traders under the trader money and small scale rural farmers under the farmer money to have access to very soft credit for performance,” the Minister noted.
In the bid to ameliorate the impacts of COVID-19 on the vulnerable groups, he disclosed that President Buhari also approved the establishment of another register called “Rapid Response Register, through which millions of Nigerians have so far been captured.
According to her, “As we speak, we have one million Nigerians that have benefited from this programme. But then in 2022, we are going to expand that to another 5 million.”
While responding to the question on some of the challenges faced in the course of the implementation of the NSIP programmes, Dr Bindir said: “So this is how the whole landscape of the condition of customers very carefully designed, very well monitored and impact assessed, and it is working.
“Yes, there are three levels of monitoring. There is a first level for the NSIP called the independent monitors. These are the community monitoring people to make sure that these intervention programmes actually get to the people that they are designed for.
“Yes, yes. So these are the three layers. The first layer is the actual community, people who have been hired to monitor. Second layer. We’re using Non-Governmental organisations, including international operating Non-Governmental organisations. And the third layer is the monitoring of monitors, which comes from the top. So all that is a strategy to ensure that it’s working.
“The first challenge is that there are people who will try to scuttle the programme. You know, there are reports whereby we see schools that don’t exist actually reported, we find this and we drop, there are situations where schools, number of pupils in schools have been inflated, we caught those, there are areas where the cooking is not taking place and then we are paying cooks, we also checkmate those, there are areas where the aggregators for the food, they are aggregating the wrong food and they’re shortchanging the children.
“So, so many composites, also on the N-Power, there are some young people who don’t go to teach in the schools, we will catch those too and exit them.
“There are people who are supposed to be on the N-Agro who are supposed to be talking to family, they don’t go to farms. So this is a social programme, and it has its associated social challenges. But the programme is well prepared, is well digitized. We have data for every single beneficiary, and we track these beneficiaries very closely,” she assured.
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