By joshua 
By Ismail M. Kabir
The monitoring team of the National Social Investment Programme (NSIP) has commended Kogi state for the proper coordination of the programmes across the state. Mr. Abdulkareem Sanni Ilyasu who is the the special assitant to the permanent secretary, Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs gave the commendation during a meeting with the management team of the Kogi Social Investment Program in Lokoja on Tuesday, 7th December, 2021.
Mr. Abdulkareem noted that the ministry has embarked on a monitoring exercise to evaluate the impacts of various programmes of the NSIP on the targeted citizens across Nigeria. He said that officials of the humanitarian ministry have been deployed to monitor and review the challenges faced by the program managers, officers, engage with aggregators and beneficiaries of all the components of the social investment programmes to ascertain areas that require improvement for better service delivery.
Mr. Abdulkareem said the team will be visiting 5 local government areas including Dekina, Okene, Adavi, Okehi and Lokoja to interact with various stakeholders and beneficiaries of N-power, National Homeg-grown School Feeding Programme and the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) to evaluate impact and challenges of the programmes in the state.
The focal person, Kogi State Social Investment Programme, Hon. Abdulkareem Onyekehi Suleiman praised the President Muhammadu Buhari for impacting the lives of thousands of poor and vulnerable women, small traders, farmers and unemployed graduates and non graduates of Kogi citizens and millions of Nigerians through the NSIP. Onyekehi noted that the school feeding program in particular has not only improved the nutrition of the school children but has also impacted on enrolment of pupils in public primary schools.
“The school feeding started in 2019 with 115,000 pupils as initial statistics obtained from National Bureau of Statistics in Kogi State. But as at today, the new revalidated data by National Bureau of Statistics puts the total pupils at over 258,000 while the accurately captured number of pupils currently benefitting is 177,000”. The focal person hoevewer, noted that the 6th tranche of feeding was ongoing but with challenges arising from mis-match in payment of over 600 cooks as a result of technical issues which emanated from payment office. He urged the national coordinating office of the program to resolve the issue for smooth and hitch-free feeding of the pupils subsequently.
Hon. Onyekehi raised concerns on other areas of the program incuding the N70 feeding budget per pupil which he said was no longer realistic considering the rising cost of food across the country. He, however commended the federal government for sustaining the NSIP, noting that all the components of the programs has injected over N20 billion into Kogi State economy.
The head of school feeding program, Hajia Khadijat Karibo equally commended the federal government for improving the lives of poor citizens through the NSIP. She said that the program has so far provided job for over 2,900 women as caterers cooking for primary 1-3 pupils in about 1,818 public schools across Kogi State.
Hajia Karibo also appealed for timely resolution of the technical hitches affecting payment of caterers to ensure smooth service delivery.
The program officers for N-Power, CCT and GEEP appreciated the federal govermnent for the numerous lives the NSIP has improved in Kogi state and across Nigeria. They said while about 12,900 beneficiaries of N-power have been exited through the Batch A and B, the present beneficiaries of the Batch C are over 13,000 while expecting similar quota for the stream 2 of same batch c. In similar vein, beneficiaries of the conditional cash transfer (CCT) have increased from 11,5000 women to 74,111 while the GEEP 2.0 has so far registered over 68,000 applicants across Kogi State.
- The monitoring team promised to relay all the challenges to the national coordinating office for prompt resolution as they conduct their exercise across the state.