President Muhammadu Buhari is expected to launch the National Poverty Index report on Thursday to ensure the institution of a more targeted approach towards addressing the issue of Poverty across the Country.
The Report to be launched by the President according to Sola Folayo, one of the main authors of the report is to look at the impact of the various Social Investment programmes put in place by the Muhammadu Buhari led administration.
Mr Folayo who was speaking on the TVC This Morning programme added that having put in place the largest Social Investment programme in the history of the Country, it is only proper to see and understand its impact on the populace.
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“Okay, thank you for the honor to speak on what we have done so far in terms of addressing the issues of eradicating extreme poverty in Nigeria. And the conversation started when the current administration came in.
So beyond the campaign trail promises, the largest social investment program was set in place, and it was situated within the Office of the vice president, and a lot of household targeted approaches were made around the homegrown, school feeding, you have the M-Power, you have the GEEP program. But in spite of this, we see here that Nigeria is the poverty capital of the world.
And it’s quite a shame, actually, when you hear that. But then we began to investigate, so what kind of objective process was this actually based on? So we worked with those people called the World Data Lab that published the information, and we began to see how this information arrived at.
And of course, the National Bureau of Statistics has the official data. They conduct very robust data around poverty. So what we did within the presidency was to partner with them, of course, through NASCO Is, the National Social Safety Net Coordinating Office.
But of course, before we started, because it was late 2019, after implementing the NCP work for about four years, so we began to look at how can we address it in a more targeted way in terms of poverty?
And then so we approached the NBS. We attempted to start the conduct of that in 2020, and then the Pandemic started. But I must say that this Thursday, in a couple of days time, the president will be launching the report.
Haven’t gone to the field to visit some of the districts across the federation, capturing realtime on time data and the experiences of the people, how they perceive poverty in all of these forms. So that has been the process, and that originated from the president. It’s been sincere to understand the dynamics of poverty, the intensity of how people face it, and to create an enabling environment and policy directions, address”.
