President Muhammadu Buhari has directed the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management, and Social Development to boost N-Power recipients by five million.
N-Power is a Federal Government youth empowerment program under the National Social Investment Program that provides a forum for hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries to acquire and develop skills.
Sadiya Farouq, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, said the President had authorized her ministry to accommodate more N-Power recipients, and that Batch-C of the initiative, which admitted over one million people, had been launched.
She stated this during the humanitarian ministry’s handing over of feeding utensils to beneficiaries of the National Home-Grown School Feeding Program, another NSIP scheme, in Nasarawa State.
Farouq said the NSIP was the government’s major social protection mechanism for many disadvantaged groups in her remarks at the ceremony, which were made accessible to our correspondent in Abuja.
She said:
“We have recently inaugurated the Batch C N-Power scheme, which is aimed at helping over one million unemployed Nigerian youths to gain useful experience and technical skills that they can convert into small businesses to further support themselves.
“This is in line with President Muhammadu Buhari’s directives for the expansion of the programme to accommodate an additional five million beneficiaries.”
The minister, who was represented by Daguleng Ishaku, a Deputy Director in her ministry, said that a total of 195,000 utensils had been handed over to Nasarawa in order to strengthen the state’s school food program.
“The school feeding programme for which we have gathered today provides one free meal to over nine million pupils in primary schools across the country.
“In Nasarawa State we are providing funds to the state selected aggregators and 2,768 vendors and to feed 194,649 pupils, in 745 schools across the 13 Local Government Areas. In that value chain alone hundreds of jobs are created every day and people are earning.”
Usman Jibrin, the NSIP Focal Person for Nasarawa State, revealed that the program began in Nasarawa in 2019 with 1,200 cooks and 86,329 students.
“At present, we have a total number of 2,768 cooks and 194,649 pupils benefitting from the programme. A total amount N1.498bn was expended in Nasarawa under the programme from January 2019 to October 2021,” he stated.
Source: Nyscinfo