About five million households have received N493billion disbursed by the Federal Government as part of its social protection measures.
This was revealed yesterday by the Minister of State for Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, Yusuf Tanko Sununu.
He, however, did not indicate the period during which the cash was made available.
He said the ministry has a budget of over N500 billion captured under the service-wide vote for the National and Social Investment Programme.
The fund is expected to be deployed for the implementation of the National Homegrown School Feeding Programme, Conditional Cash Transfer, N-Power training and FarmerMoni, the minister said.
“Already, over five million families, which represent almost 75 million households, have been reached through the rapid response register. And over N493 billion has been disbursed,” he said.
Sununu spoke in Abuja at a briefing on ‘sustainable response to address the humanitarian gap arising from the partial suspension of World Food Programme (WFP) operations in the Northeast and Northwest’.
The minister said the funds are disbursed based on the national social register and reflect the report of the multidimensional poverty index in Nigeria.
Sununu said: “The report says that 65 per cent of vulnerable or poor people are in the northern part of the country, while 35 per cent are in the southern part.
“If you look at the urban-rural ratio, it also goes 70-30 per cent.
“Seventy per cent are in the rural areas, while 30 per cent are in the urban areas.
“So the beneficiaries in the northern part of the country are almost 71 per cent, while in the southern part, it’s 29 per cent.
“This is just reflecting the data that we are working with.”
He spoke of a plan to give N300,000 to 21,000 smallholder farmers across the country through the Government Enterprises and Empowerment Programme (GEEP).
