Some beneficiaries of the school feeding programme
Federal Government’s National Homegrown School Feeding Programme, which kicked-off last year, may have gulped not less than N674, 785 for 24 per child, totaling meals on some 1,051, 619 pioneer primary school pupils across seven states of the federation.
School feeding, which is a social inclusion programme of government is aimed at boosting enrolment at the primary level.
The amount represents the nominal cost on each pupil for the programme, in which the government said N7.092b was spent between last year and May 5, 2017 when the budget implementation terminated.
Mr. laolu Akande, Senior Special Assistant on Media to Acting President Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, disclosed that to implement the programme, 25 million meals were served pupils within the period under review, indicating that each pupil received approximately 24 meals if distributed across board at the cost of N674, 785 per child under the programme.
Akande lamented that government’s vision of the entire Social Investment package (SIP) could not be attained due to shortfall in expected revenue, revealing that instead of N500b expenditure plan, only a paltry N41b could be realised.
On the broad, general perspective of the SIP, he said over a million Nigerians are now beneficiaries through the programme, including, 57,234 interest free loans given to artisans, traders, adding that the Acting President has ordered that urgent expansion of programme spending be made to reach more beneficiaries.
Effort, he said, is being made to validate others and ensure that the 200, 000 places provided for in the first batch of the N-Power programme are all effectively validated as provided for under the first phase of the programme.
Akande added that a date for engagement of more N-power beneficiaries and reopening of the portal to receive more applications would be announced soon, stressing that for the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) scheme, 26,942 beneficiaries are being funded at the monthly N5,000 stipend in 84 Local Government councils of nine states, including, Borno, Cross River, Niger, Kwara, Ekiti, Kogi, Oyo, Osun and Bauchi.
He remarked that based on recent directive from the Acting President, the number is expected to add up to about 400,000 beneficiaries (and in more States) in a couple of months.
According to the spokesman, the Government Enterprise Empowerment Programme (GEEP) designed for the empowerment of market women, traders, artisans and others, has also recorded good progress with the disbursement of 57,234 interest free loans, except a one-time low administrative fee.
0 comments:
Post a Comment