FG Determined To Uplift 70 Million Citizens From Poverty – Minister

The Federal Government is rapidly retooling its numerous Social Investment Schemes to enable it to immediately lift an initial 70 million Nigerians out of poverty within the next twelve months. Speaking on a television programme monitored by NIGERIAN ANCHOR on Sunday, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Dr. Betty Edu listed the programmes and their targeted intervention figures to include the N-Power programme that is aimed at removing five million people out of poverty in five years and the GEEP that is supposed to provide funds to 1.5 million Nigerian small business owners and the Home-Grown School Feeding for 10million children amongst others. She disclosed that a presidential approval shall be obtained on October 17, 2023 for the roll out of the repackaged Conditional Cash Transfer which shall be targeted at benefitting a total of 15 million households. To achieve this, she said, critical stakeholders partnering with the ministry were already on the field working round the clock to revalidate the data and to clean up the register. “As we speak, we are having a verification exercise. Every state can bear us witness that we have put boots on the ground – persons who are working with the state cash transfer office as well as the governors who are the heads of the steering committee and then several other persons,” she disclosed. She disclosed that altogether, about 62million individuals shall benefit from the N25,000 that shall be disbursed to 15million households per month for an initial period of three months. Regarding the other flagship scheme of the National Social Investment Programme (NSIP), she said, the Federal Government will restart the Tradermoni scheme simultaneously in the 109 senatorial districts in the country in November with each beneficiary getting N50,000 to support their businesses.To achieve this, a large market shall be selected from each senatorial zone where the traders shall be processed and selected for the intervention, Dr. Edu disclosed. Even though she did not disclose how many traders shall be captured at this phase of the programme, Edu emphasized that, “Now, for the first set, which we are starting in November, we are selecting one big market per senatorial district. That is 109 markets and we are going into the markets, capturing the traders in their shops in the markets.” Towards the end of last year, the National Bureau of Statistics released the report on its national poverty survey in which it disclosed that a total of 133 million Nigerians were multidimensionally poor. Out of this number, about 71million Nigerians have been classified as extremely poor. Speaking to these grim statistics, Mrs. Edu explained that the immediate objective of the Federal Government was to pull the extremely poor out of poverty while erecting safety nets to prevent the multidimensionally poor from falling into extreme poverty. Earlier, the minister had announced the suspension of the N-Power programme which had been enmeshed in controversies. She threatened that those found guilty of any form of malfeasance shall be made to face the due process of the law.