FG’s conditional cash transfer scheme commences in Oyo

The much-awaited Conditional Cash Transfer Scheme of the Federal Government commenced on Tuesday in Oyo State with the official flag off of payments by the Commissioner for Women affairs, Alhaja Faosat Sanni, in three local government areas of Ibadan, the state capital.

The project is expected to reach a total of 14,000 households.

The scheme was flagged off in Ona Ara, Oluyole and Egbeda local government areas of the state with beneficiaries getting N20, 000 or N30, 000 each depending on the group they belong to in the scheme.

The payment is N5000 monthly and the current payment covers arrears of four months; January to April.

Those that collected N20, 000 are caregivers of homes where there are no additional beneficiaries in the household while those that were given N30, 000 are those who qualified for the top-up programme where additional N5000 is given to specific beneficiaries bi-monthly and this category of people are those who fall between the ages of 18 to 40.

Speaking to Tribune Online on Tuesday, Mr Oyekola Oladipo, one of the coordinators confirmed that the scheme has commenced. He stated that, “yes, we started it today, we were to start yesterday but we had a technical challenge; the challenge was that the payment agent could not be credited by the assigned payment service provider. It was very late yesterday and early this morning that the payment agents were credited.

“So we started today, the Honourable Commissioner for Women Affairs, Permanent Secretary of the ministry, myself and officials from the ministry went out today to do the monitoring and at Ona Ara, Oluyole and Egbeda, the commissioner did official flag off of the payment,” he said.

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Oyekola explained further that the people paid were not just picked based on political affiliation or any bias but were those that had been assessed earlier for the scheme by another agency.

“The people that are being paid are existing beneficiaries that had been part of the scheme since 2016. They are not new people but those that had been assessed and had been enjoying the conditional cash transfer from 2016. They are not just manufactured because of coronavirus; they have been beneficiaries for long.

“We do not generate register, another agency working for the Federal Government did the assessment of people and population register used long before now and it is the register generated by that agency that we made use of. We only implement, we don’t generate register,” Oyekola emphasised.

The conditional cash transfer scheme popularly referred to as CCT is a government project aimed at reducing poverty by making welfare programs where government transfers money to people that meet a particular criterion to reduce poverty.