The Federal Government of Nigeria has been advised by the world bank to scale up its social investment programmes that is capable of addressing a large number of people living in extreme poverty in the country.
Mr Rachid Benmessaoud, World Bank Country Director, on Friday stated this at the launch of the Africa Social Safety Nets Report by the National Social Safety Nets Coordinating Office (NASSCO) and World Bank.
“Nigeria spending less than three per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on social investments was not enough to fight against poverty, build human capital and spur economic growth” he said
Furthermore, he affirmed that the bank was in full support of the country’s social investments and that was why it helped to establish a Social Registry, containing legitimate names of poor households in parts of the country.
He stated that the registry had helped the federal and state governments to reach genuine vulnerable people through different targeted intervention programmes like the conditional cash transfers.
Meanwhile, the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mrs Zainab Ahmed disagreed with the Social Safety Nets report, saying that Nigeria spends more than three per cent of GDP on social investments.
She further said that the report did not take account of other social protection programmes like pensions, health insurance and interventions that target people living with disabilities.
Her statement read:
“The Report further reveals that West Africa has the highest number of Cash Transfer Programmes in Africa.
” The implication of this for us is that we must continue working towards a long-time solution to poverty, as Cash Transfers cannot be sustained.
“This means that we must have a long-term plan to build human capital and resilience of our people.
“Our midterm focus will be to have in place a universal health coverage for all, scale up our school lunch programmes for all primary school students and provide scholarship for all students in tertiary education.
“In the long term, Nigeria will be thinking towards transformational growth and development by setting up economic clusters for entrepreneurs,”
Also, the National Coordinator, NASSCO, Mr Iorwa Apera, said that his office would ensure that the next report on social safety nets gives a more holistic picture of the government’s spending on pro-poor programmes.
“The President has declared that it is lifting a hundred million people out of poverty.
“That is a strong policy statement and what are we doing with this is that we are building a social register of the poor and vulnerable targeting interventions to lift them out of poverty.
” At the moment the register is in 32 states and has 5.4 million individuals, which serves as a huge database for lifting these 100 million people out of poverty,” he said.
