Edu: 8.3m Nigerians in Borno, Adamawa, Yobe in Dire Humanitarian Need

Kuni Tyessi in Abuja

The Minister for Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Dr. Betta Edu,has lamented that out of the 16 million Nigerians affected by the humanitarian crisis, three states of Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe were the worst hit, with about 8.3 million of the people in dire straits.
Speaking in Abuja, weekend, she said over 16 million Nigerians were affected by humanitarian crises either man-made or natural disaster with over 8.3m of them based in Borno, Adamawa, Yobe, and several states in the North Central and others spread across the country.

“The UN said Benue had become the humanitarian need capital in Nigeria, and as such, a lot of work needs to be done in the humanitarian angle,” she lamented.
The minister maintained that, “One of the agendas of the Tinubu administration is to ensure that poverty is alliviated in Nigeria in line with the SDG goal one.The president is coming up with a very robust programme to alleviate Nigerians from poverty.”

Edu stressed that poverty alleviation was now the new and important mandate of her ministry “as our work is to see how we can get those in poverty out of poverty and those at the verge of getting into poverty increase to social safety to protect them from falling into poverty.
“A lot of work is being put into the planning stage as we have finished the debriefing from the different departments as well as the agencies under us. We are working assiduously to finalise the plans.

“In a couple of weeks, we’ll be fully launching into this plans to help President Tinubu take out over 136m Nigerians out of poverty as implementation has started to help cushion the effect of the fuel subsidy removal.”
The minister described the poverty alleviation schemes of her ministry as robust plans to create jobs, promote means of livelihood, shelter, education, healthcare, and other basic needs as well as agriculture to help end hunger.

“One of the innovations we are bringing in to ensure Conditional Cash Transfer transparency is to carry out a thorough verification of the social register, validate it, and then expand it to accommodate more persons.
“We will be working with the World Bank while seeking approval from the President to begin the Conditional Cash Transfer to Nigerians.
“We want to increase the Social Safety Net for Nigerians to enable us to pull millions of Nigerians out of poverty in a transparent manner as well as count the numbers together just as we counted Covid-19 cases using a digitalised system,” she further said.