National Coordinator of the National Social Safety Nets Coordinating Office (NASSCO), Iorwa Apera, has disclosed that over $300 million of the $500 million World Bank facility sourced for the National Social Safety Nets Projects, has so far been spent on different streams of the project including the Conditional Cash Transfer project and building the National Social Register.
He stated this at an interactive session with journalists in Abuja.
Apera explained that the social register was conceptualised to identify and register the poor and vulnerable, using a bottom-top approach, and their socio-economic profile to inform pro-poor policies and manage social programmes in an integrated way.
According to him, as at June 30, 2021, households captured in the national social register were 8,513,679 while the number of individuals was 36,208,077 in the 36 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), 711 local governments, 8,969 council wards and 91,883 communities.
He further stated that in response to the effects of the Covid19 pandemic on the urban poor in particular, the Rapid Response Register (RRR) was designed as a shock response framework by the National Social Safety-Net Program (NASSP) in collaboration with the World Bank to provide emergency social interventions to poor and vulnerable households in challenging circumstances (natural disaster, epidemic, pandemic, economic downturn.)
The coordinator explained that the RRR targeted at the self-employed, wage employed and urban poor was projected to capture 20 million Nigerians out of which one to three million would benefit from a Covid-19 cash transfer programme for at least six months.
He said in the course of its work, NASSCO had identified unemployment and illiteracy as some of the key drivers of poverty.
While noting the effects of inflation and insecurity on the stipend paid to the vulnerable populations, Apera said in the context of local communities, N5,000 was still significant enough to feed some
families, adding that in some communities, women were polling resources to carry out self help projects.
