Sola Ojo, Kaduna
Kaduna State Government, yesterday, commenced a three-day capacity building training for Community Based Targeting Teams (CBTTs) and enumerators to capture 70 per cent poor and vulnerable homes across the state in its social register.
Already, about 30 per cent of vulnerable homes from nine local government areas are already benefitting from conditional cash transfer under the National Social Safety Nets Programme (NASSP). The state hopes to capture the remaining 70 per cent spread across 14 local government areas through nine team members carefully selected from each of the 14 LGAs for the exercise.
Kaduna government through the office of the State Operations Coordinating Unit (SOCU) with guidance from the National Social Safety Nets Coordinating Office, has been working to actualise a social register that leaves no one or groups behind.
One of the aims of the training was to enable permanent residents of the identified community to be able to identify poor and vulnerable groups among them based on what they agreed upon as yardstick for being poor, using Proxy Mean Test (PMT) – scientifically proven way of identifying the poorest of the poor.
The training took place concurrently in there senatorial zones of Zaria, Kaduna and Kafanchan. Focal Person, National Social Investment Programmes, Kaduna State, Mrs. Saude Amina Atoyebi, said the training was vital to improve the needed data in social register without which it would be impossible to serve the poorest and vulnerable citizens in the state.
“The importance of data cannot be overemphasised, especially in difficult times such as this where the provision of support to poor and vulnerable households (PVHHs) need to be backed by evidence of who these persons are and how they were identified.
“The number of PVHHs captured on the Social Register was 20,500 in nine local government areas (LGAs) only.
The Governor, recognising the importance of this data, tasked us to rapidly populate the register.
“Today, about eight months later, we now have over 130,000 PVHHs across the same nine LGAs. While a lot of hard work has gone into this assignment, there is still a lot of ground to be covered,” she said.