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Over eight million Nigerians will benefit from special intervention programmes of the Federal government, scheduled to begin in a matter of weeks.
Below are the highlights:
- 5.5 million school children to be fed for 200 school days in first phase of homegrown school feeding programme
- Over 1.6 million Nigerian traders, market women, men, artisans to receive loans.
- 1 million extremely poor and vulnerable Nigerians to receive N60,000 this year in 12 months payments of N5000 each.
All together the federal government would be directly impacting the lives of more than 8 million Nigerians in different social investment 2016 budget spending that would provide succor and be a ready-made palliative to ordinary Nigerians.
This disclosure was made last night by the Senior Special Assistant for Media & Publicity to the President, Mr. Laolu Akande, in an interaction with the press in Abuja.
Other areas of the programmes include:
- The direct provision of very soft loan -cash for market women, men and traders, including artisans and Agric workers. This would be for a total of 1.76m Nigerians, without the requirement for conventional collateral. Some of the traders will likely get about N60,000. A total sum of N140.3B has already been appropriated for this in the budget,
- Payment of between N23,000 to N30,000 per month to 500,000 unemployed graduates who would be trained, paid and deployed to work as volunteer teachers, public health officers and extension service workers among other responsibilities.
-They would also be given electronic devices to empower them technologically both for their assignments and beyond
-similarly 100,000 artisans would also be trained and paid N191.5B has been set aside for this in the passed budget. - 100,000 tertiary students in Science Technology Engineering & Maths-STEM, plus Education will partake in the N5.8B already provided for this education grant in the budget. This payment would also be paid directly to the students.