The Federal Government says it has registered 86,000 beneficiaries from six local government areas in Zamfara under its Conditional Cash Transfer program, CCT.
The National Coordinator of the program, Dr Temitope Sinkaiye, disclosed this during a 3-day training on Savings and Group Mobilization for local government cash transfer facilitators for the program on Tuesday in Gusau.
The News Agency f Nigeria, NAN, reports that the program is one of the components of Social Investment Program, SIP, initiated by President Muhammad Buhari to reduce poverty level among Nigerians.
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Mrs Sinkaiye was represented by the National Communications Officer of the program, Henry Ayede.
The coordinator listed the six selected local government areas as Anka, Bungudu, Birnin-Magaji, Kaura-Namoda, Tsafe and Talata-Mafara.
“Apart from the 86,000 beneficiaries, we also have additional data of 20,000 registered to be enrolled into the program making our beneficiaries to be over 100,000 in Zamfara.
“We have so far enrolled over 700,000 beneficiaries across the 29 states and Zamfara have the highest number of beneficiaries across the country.
“We are here for enrollment training of 102 local government facilitators on Saving and Group Mobilization,” she said.
“This training became necessary, because it is expected for every beneficiary of this program to be saving.
“We realized that giving the beneficiaries N5,000 monthly is not enough to pull them out of poverty except if we train them on behavioral change,’’ she said.
She said that the participants are expected to go back and cascade what they have learnt to the beneficiaries at the community levels.
“We want our beneficiaries to imbibe the culture of saving so that they would be forming groups in form of either contributions or cooperatives,” she added.
She urged the participants of the training to be attentive, so that they will learn and understand the concept of the program.
“You know, the program is targeting to reduce over 5 million vulnerable and poor people in Nigeria who fall below absolute poverty line,’’ she said.
NAN
