Social Investment scheme racks up more beneficiaries, and more bothers

Toks David, Lagos

Amid revelations over the past two months that the country’s ambitious Social Investment Programmes have run into complications with funding and fraud, it appears that the scheme has recorded some notable and measurable successes in terms of reach to beneficiaries across Nigeria.

In an action report released Friday by the Special Adviser to the President on Social Investment, Maryam Uwais, the National Social Investment Office laid out its March update on the progress of the trillion naira public assistance project.

Of the four big programmes – N-Power, National Home Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP), Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT), and GEEP (Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme) – school feeding, with its initial target of five and a half million primary school pupils eligible in 20 states, according to the report, has expanded to 22 states (Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu, Kaduna, Taraba, Benue, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Plateau, Abia, Delta, Zamfara, Cross River, Akwa Ibom, Imo, Jigawa, Bauchi, Kano, Niger, Katsina and Gombe), with 7,487,441 pupils being fed by 75,333 cooks in 33,981 public primary schools.

This represents an increase by almost one and a half million pupils from February, which recorded 6,044,625 pupils being fed in 20 states.

With cost of feeding per child at an agreed price of N70 per day for 200 days in the year, the feeding programme not only exceeded its target, in sheer numbers it benefited the most people.

For the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT), a programme “aimed at providing targeted transfers to poor and vulnerable households,” which had expended N5,235,401,087 in February according to the Social Investment Office, 21 states have established State Cash Transfer Unit (SCTU), with 217 LGAs setting up established LG cash offices, and trained staff.

In all, CCT had 297,973 beneficiaries in 20 States (Adamawa, Anambra, Bauchi, Benue, Borno (IDP), Cross river, – Ekiti, Gombe, Jigawa, Kano, Katsina, Kogi, Kwara, Niger, Osun, Oyo, Plateau, Taraba, Nassarawa and – Kaduna). This is against the targeted 1 million households who are to receive N5,000 per month. The big centerpiece of the programme, the National Social Register, has so far 455,857 PVHHs (Poor and Vulnerable Households) uploaded onto its database in the following 22 states: Adamawa, Anambra, Bauchi, Benue, Borno (IDP), Cross River, Ekiti, Gombe, Jigawa, Kano, Katsina, Kogi, Kwara, Niger, Osun, Oyo, Plateau, Taraba, Nasarawa and Kaduna, Delta and Imo.

However, it is the CCT scheme that has come under direct criticism for the way it has been handled, stirring controversy with regards to beneficiary selection and attendant fraudulent claims. The Senate Appropriation Committee had earlier in April threatened to cut allocations to the programme, with Maryam Uwais, the SIP coordinator, having to give an account of the entire programme.

The new report in fact acknowledged the challenges of what it called “political interplay and interference at State level and Federal level, especially with regards to identification and selection of beneficiaries.” It also generally identified an “increase in possibilities of fraud at State and [Federal] Government level(s), which have been detected and are currently being dealt with.”

On a more positive note, N-Power, the volunteer skills acquisition and development programme for unemployed young graduates of higher institutions, did good numbers and hit significant targets in the period under review, with 96% (174,000) of current beneficiaries having been successfully paid out of the total number deployed (181,019) in all 36 States.

According to the report, the “current scope of the program is 200,000 graduate beneficiaries from all 36 States plus FCT. Next batch of 300,000 beneficiaries has been selected and verified ready for deployment, as the application window closed in August 2017.”

The programme target breaks down N-Power into Corps (500,000), Knowledge (25,000) and Build (75,000) schemes.

N-Power also established partnerships with the Red Cross, the Presidential Committee for North East Initiatives (PCNI) and the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) to launch an innovation workshop called the North East Makeathon, which requested and got innovative pitches from aspiring entrepreneurs to solve to pressing humanitarian problems.

Engaging with the World Bank and the Enterprise Development Center of the Pan Atlantic University (the Lagos Business School), the innovative solutions would spur the establishment of Nigeria’s own Climate Innovation Center at the institution, with a Climate Innovation Challenge launched in March leading to the selection of the first set of start-ups to be incubated in the NCIC.

For the GEEP (targeted at women’s cooperatives, market women, small scale businesses, farmers, agric workers and artisans), “the current scope of the program is 500,000 beneficiaries for phase 1 (owners of small businesses registered with associations) from the 36 States.”

As of March, “disbursements have commenced in 36 States and the FCT.”

The enterprise support and small loans programme has “so far disbursed 264,259 loans to 4,822 cooperatives (another 246,973 in approved queue, awaiting Federal funds) to beneficiaries across 36 States and the FCT.”

It is that last part of the implementation report (“awaiting Federal funds”) that has, according to the Social Investment Programme, been an impediment to the roll out of the scheme on time and as effectively as the planners intended. The challenges have affected every level of implementation, from delays “with building technological systems due to procurement and funding challenges,” to what it identified as “lack of interest/support from the private sector and some donor agencies.”

But perhaps the most interesting revelation of the March progress report has to do with the most vulnerable direct beneficiaries of the scheme itself. It cited the “poor levels of literacy and low self-esteem of our beneficiaries, many of whom have never held the volumes of cash we are paying them directly.” It is a blindspot that can, and has been, exploited, but also one that the scheme seems well aware of and is taking pains to monitor and correct, amid persistent funding issues for a sprawling project that could very easily slide into another big government boondoggle.