The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Prof. Nentawe Goshwe Yilwatda has said that the ministry has stopped distributing physical cash to vulnerable citizens.
The minister disclosed this on Wednesday during an interview on Arise TV, stressing that the ministry is capturing all the digital identity of the people that are on social register to avoid the pitfalls which characterized the ministry in the past.
Yilwatda said, “The first step we’ve taken is that there’s no physical distribution of cash to anybody again. You’ll never see anybody in the ministry distributing cash to anybody in market spaces, stadia or groups of people receiving cash. That has stopped. So, what we’re doing now is that for any money to be given, we’ll make transfers to each of the accounts that have been captured.
“Secondly, we’re going to digitalise the processes, and that is what we’ve done now. We’re capturing all the digital identity of the people that are on social register. We’re also geo-tagging every home so that from the social register you can get the location of the homes, you can get who is there and you can have a view of the kind of home they live in.”
He added, “If I get the identity of the person and I get the geo-location of the home and I discover that the house is a five-storey building, I’ll know that the home is not for a poor person. So with that we can actually have an overview of the people from our dashboard. We can have a view of homes, the kind of people that are in the community, the kind of vehicle they have, the kind of social services they have in the community. You’ll know whether they are the poorest of the poor. That is one form of ensuring that you have some level of sincerity, and you block all the names that are not supposed to be on the social register.
“Number two, what we’re doing is to ensure that we design programmes that will exit these people from just being given handouts and that is why we’re doing what is called financial literacy training for all the beneficiaries. Every beneficiary is being trained financially so he or she knows what to do with the money and how he can exit out of this programme.
“So, if you’re given N75,000 as a rural farmer, you can buy fertilizer, you can buy farm inputs, you can expand your farm, you can also start a small scale business. There are people in the villages that can work for N30,000, N40,000, N50,000 businesses, selling vegetables and just doing micro businesses in the villages. These are some of the things that we are doing to improve the lifestyles of people in the rural communities.
“Thirdly we’re working with the IDPs who are mostly affected by the crisis that we’re having. We signed a MoU with NALDA, they will now farm in a cooperative, cultivating 10,000 hectares of land across different states that are affected by this insurgency and also flooding across the country. We want to ensure that this 10,000 hectares will support about 20,000 households. We’re providing them with fertilizers, farm inputs and at the end of the harvest, we will take 70 percent of what they will harvest and give them the cash component and 30 percent will be the food component. So, they’ll have both cash and food components while we take that 70 percent and support other IDPs in other communities.
“Simply put, we’re using IDPs to support IDPs. The forthcoming programme that we are doing to support the vulnerable is the young beyond people. The government has purchased over 100,000 items in different sectors from auto mechanic to tractors, to vulcanizing to beauty, to cooking to bakery, and others. These are done to support the young people. These items are put across to target 500,000 households with that kind of project in terms of creating small scale industries and creating cooperatives of people that will exit them into these.
“We’re working with international donor partners to ensure that we implement all these programmes together. Then we also working from our budget by doing pilot skill programme of taking the young people to the private sector
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