The Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim Foundation, a non-profit humanitarian organization on Saturday awarded a grant of 10million naira to some small scale entrepreneurs in Abuja as part of her Economic Empowerment Programme for vulnerable sections of society.
The Foundation, promoted by a former Presidential Candidate, Mr. Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim, gave fifty thousand naira to each of the 200 beneficiaries.
In his speech at the event, Olawepo-Hashim explained that his gesture, which is to give back to the society, has no relationship to his political aspirations.
According to him, “I have been doing this for decades. I have a passion to make society better. That was why I was involved in student unionism in those days. I was also involved in the Committee for Defence of Human Rights (CDHR) and now I’m a businessman. So, one way to intervene is in the area of economic empowerment.
He added that “what I can do at this time when things are really bad is to show love to underprivileged people in particular, and that we have been doing for decades. We have done training of young people in this digital acquisition over 1000 of them. So this is going to be continuous thing.”
One of the beneficiaries, Luka Dakwoyi, in his remarks, urged the rich in the society to emulate the APC chieftain, saying there are many Nigeians out there in need of succor as the state of the economy bites harder.
According to Statista.com, in 2022, an estimated population of 88.4 million people in Nigeria lived in extreme poverty. The number of men living on less than 1.90 U.S. dollars a day in the country reached around 44.7 million, while the count was at 43.7 million for women.
The Nigeria Bureau of Statistics, NBS puts its own figure at 133 million.
Not a few of the participants at the event commended gesture of the Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim Foundation and called on well meaning Nigerians to emulate the non-partisan approach of Mr. Olawepo-Hashim towards ameliorating the plight of the less privileged.
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