Prof. Nentawe Yilwatda, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, says six million Nigerians have benefited from the Federal Government’s Conditional Cash Transfer programme in six months.
Mr Yilwatda disclosed this while addressing beneficiaries of the ongoing Skills-to- Wealth (S2W) Training programme on Thursday in Jos.
The minister, who said that only two million Nigerians benefitted from the programme in the last nine years, however, disclosed that the ministry had adopted a new approach.
“Only two million people benefitted from the conditional cash transfer in the past; it simply means that in nine years of that programme, just 200,000 people benefited in a year.
“We are in the process of digitising all the homes of people on the social register, giving them digital identity, creating e-wallets account for them, and carrying out physical verification.
“We have removed a lot of names out of the social register that have errors. They are not known, and we couldn’t verify and identify them and their homes within the social register.
“In six months, we have reached out to six million people; it simply means that we are doing one million people per month,” he said.
The minister added that 15 million Nigerians would be enrolled under the programme by October.
“The President wants to ensure that before October, we can support 15 million households.
“The president has directed that we should ensure that that money reached these people in nine months,” he explained.
Mr Yilwatda also said that the ministry engaged the World Bank to independently verify the programme.
“After we delivered to the first four million people, I asked the World Bank to set an independent team to do a verification of these people we are paying.
“We wanted to be sure that we are doing the right thing, and the result revealed that the people we paid were actually on the social register.
“They visited the homes of the beneficiaries and met 96 per cent of them in person.
“The remaining four per cent that they couldn’t verify are those in hard to reach areas and those who migrated due to insecurity,” he explained.
On the S2W programme, the minister said that it was designed to empower Nigerian youths in three thematic sectors, including agriculture, renewable energy, and automobile.
NAN
