The President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, has expressed confidence about lifting 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years.
In a post sighted by African Entertainment on his official Facebook page, Mr Buhari says “We remain confident that our goal of lifting 100million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years is achievable.”
According to him, “Considering the positive impact of our Social Investment Programs, I recently approved an increase in the number of N-Power program beneficiaries from 500,000 to 1,000,000.”
“Out of this, 510,000 have started the programme while the competitive selection process for onboarding the outstanding 490,000 beneficiaries is in progress,” he added.
“The National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme is currently being implemented in 35 States of the Federation and the FCT. Over 103,000 women have been engaged and empowered as cooks under the programme, while about 10 million pupils are being fed across public primary schools in the country,” he stated.
“To grant increased access to credit to the most poor and vulnerable, I have directed an increase in the disbursement of Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme loans to an additional one million beneficiaries laying more emphasis on the smallholding farmers through the Farmer Moni program.”
A report by The Conversation sighted by African Entertainment cited the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics as saying in 2020 that 40% or 83 million Nigerians live in poverty.
The report added that although Nigeria’s poverty profile for 2021 has not yet been released, it is estimated that the number of poor people will increase to 90 million, or 45% of the population, in 2022.
