Maryam Uwais, special adviser to
the president on social investments, says the administration of President
Muhammadu Buhari is the most successful in investing in people.
In a statement on Friday, Uwais
said since the inception of the social investment pqrogramme (SIP) of the
federal government, N500 billion has been budgeted for it.
“In the last three years we have
heard thousands of testimonials of people’s lives being changed for the better,
as a sign of success and deep penetration into our communities. We continue to
see evident improvement in the lives of our beneficiaries,” the president’s
aide said.
“It is not in doubt that the
Social Investment Programme of this administration is the largest, most
ambitious, and I dare say the most successful attempt by any government, to
invest in our people, in Nigeria’s history.
“Since inception, we have
provided N500 billion for the programmes in the 2016, 2017 and 2018 budgets,
with close to N250 billion, being 23.63 percent of the entire three years
budget appropriated for N-SIPS having been released. For the 2018 budget so
far, however, we have received 18 percent of the amount appropriated for all
our progammes.”
She said the Home Grown School
Feeding Programme is a programme aimed at feeding of young children in public
primary schools with the aim of improving their nutrition, increasing school
enrolment and reducing the incidence of malnutrition.
“So far, we are feeding over
9,300,892 children in 49,837 government schools in 26 States. Being a programme
that also aims at empowering communities, we have also engaged 96,972 cooks
with over a 100,000 small-scale farmers being part of the value chain,
supplying locally sourced ingredients,” Uwais said.
“It is noteworthy of mention that
currently, public schools require
6.8 million eggs, 594 cattle and
83 metric tons of fish to be supplied to the cooks, every week, for the purpose
of feeding the children.
“The Conditional Cash Transfer
Programme is giving out N5,000 monthly to 297,973 households in Nigeria. It is
currently being implemented in 20 states. As a critical component of the cash
transfer programme, we have trained almost 3,000 community cash transfer facilitators
in every ward where the programme is ongoing.
“The N-Power is currently
employing 500,000 youth graduates. It is the largest post-tertiary employment
programme in Africa, where beneficiaries are paid a monthly stipend of N30,000
and deployed as volunteers into various sectors of need in the public space,
such as health, agriculture, education and public finance.”
According to her, there are no
third parties engaged to pay monies to beneficiaries.
“All monies are paid directly
through their bank accounts, having been verified by their BVN’s through a
close collaboration with NIBSS,” she said.
Uwais added that the task to
address poverty and unemployment in the country should be a collective
responsibility for all citizens.
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