TheCable

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.