Social Investment programmes start October

In fulfilment of its campaign promises, the Federal Government announced that the implementation of its Social Investment programmes would start before the end of October.

This is contained in a statement issued in Abuja on Tuesday by the Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to the Vice President, Mr Laolu Akande.

He said the Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, SAN, disclosed this while fielding questions in an interview with a small group of radio journalists and producers at the Presidential Villa.

Akande stated that the vice president announced that the graduate employment scheme of the Federal Government would commence by the end of October.

According to Akande, the implementation plans for the effective commencement of a number of the Social Investment programmes of the Buhari presidency has reached advanced stages as the selection of the first 200,000 unemployed graduates to get jobs is now being completed.

“We expect that before the end of the month, we will engage 200, 000,” out of the 500,000 unemployed graduates the Buhari administration plans to hire in the N-Power jobs programme.

“The direct government jobs is meant to keep these young people occupied, pay them some amount of money and also give them a device, which will also help them to learn several skills that they can develop as time goes on.”

“We expect that before the end of this month, we should have engaged 200,000 of them and we are hoping that before the end of the year we should have engaged more,” the statement quoted Osinbajo as saying.

On the Home-Grown School Feeding programme, Akande said, the vice president disclosed that the kick off in several states is scheduled for end of October.

He said: “Definitely before the end of this month, we expect that several states would have come on stream with their Home-grown School Feeding Programmes.

“ This will energise agriculture in the different states because it is what you plant that you feed the children with, we will be hiring caterers, cooks, etc in each state because it will be Federal Government funded from Primaries 1-3 and the state governments hopefully would be able to cater for the other classes,” Osinbajo was quoted as saying.

The vice president, the statement said, noted that Home-Grown School Feeding programme is another section of the Social Investment programmes that impacts directly on the lives of Nigerian children and families.

Akande stated that the Micro-Credit scheme for which government would give loans to more than a million Nigerian artisans, traders and others ranging from N60,000 to N100,000 would also start in October.

According to him, for women across the country, we are giving loans, micro credit loans to about 1.5 million women.

“We are focusing on market women and artisans, loans between N60,000 and 100,000 each.

“We are working through the Bank of Industry, BOI. They are going to be giving out these loans, we‘ve already identified the banks and everybody who is involved in this.

“We should be flagging-off hopefully before the end of this month,” the statement quoted Osinbajo as saying.