FG: Targeting 16M for Social Protection is a Milestone

•Says Nigeria has 71 million citizens on its social register, 9.6 million under school feeding programme 

•As World Bank says 2 billion people in low, middle income countries missed or inadequately covered by social protection

Dike Onwuamaeze

The federal government says it has achieved a milestone record by targeting 16 million poor and vulnerable Nigerians with social protection services based on a report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) that about 90 million Nigerians are poor.

The declaration was made yesterday by Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, Professor Nentawe Goshwe Yilwatda, when he featured as one of the panellists during the World Bank launch of its “State of Social Protection Report 2025: The 2-Billion-Person Challenge.”

The World Bank’s report stated that two billion people out of the 6.3 billion people in Low Income Countries (LICs) and Middle Income Countries (MICs), were either missed or inadequately covered by social protection systems. 

But sharing Nigeria’s experience in providing social protection services to its vulnerable citizens, Yilwatda said, “We work with set of statistics from the NBS that showed that 42 per cent of Nigerians are poor, which covers roughly about 90 million Nigerians.

“And we are targeting 16 million out of this 90 million, which is a milestone for us as a country.”

He added, “Based on statistics, too, we have more rural poor than urban poor. And 68 per cent of the people we are reaching, out of this 90 million people, are from the rural poor and the rest 32 per cent are from the urban poor.”

He also identified social register as the bedrock of Nigeria’s social protection delivery.

The minister said, “We started social protection system in 2015 and was supported by the World Bank in its implementation.

“Then, we had zero social register in 2015. But we have 71 million individuals today on the social register. 

“But that is not just the impacts we have made. We have been able to make the giant stride in building the highest social and financial inclusion in the country.

“Today all of them now have bank accounts or an e-wallet for those who are in distant communities. This has helped to expand fintechs’ penetration in Nigeria because it has deepened access to financial services by these people.  

“That has actually in itself built a new set of young people and young talents in fintech who are deepening technology and deepening income among the rural poor people.

“That is what we have done on the social register within the last one decade.”

Yilwatda added, “Social register has formed the bedrock for every other service that we are also working on starting with the conditional cash transfer that we have in Nigeria.

“Just over nine years, we were able to reach out to only two million households covering less than 10 million individuals. Today we are reaching out to 15 million households. This is growing from two million to 15 million households that cover about 60 million people.”

Yilwatda also disclosed that 65 per cent of household leaders covered by Nigeria’s social protection service were women because they had more chances to be poor.

He stated, “Most of the care givers are also women and that have deepened financial inclusion for the womenfolk. That has also improved their access to financial services and has impacted especially the rural women.”

He said Nigeria was also using social protection delivery, like the school feeding programme, to address the challenge posed by out-of-school children.  

The minister said the school feeding programme had grown from covering just about five million pupils three years ago to about 9.6 million currently, and was presently targeting 11 million children in public primary schools supported by the federal government, while the remaining numbers were being supported by the state governments.

He added that the government was also leveraging on digital infrastructure to provide digital identity to the beneficiaries of its social protection programme for easy tracing and transparency.

Yilwatda stated, “We are also geo-tanking the homes of these 19 million households and that in itself will help us to respond quicker, improve our transparency and build confidence among the people in Nigeria.

“We have learnt the lesson that data driven decision making is very important for us.”

According to him, most of the social protection systems are designed via bottom-up approach model that enables communities to “reshape our programmes and direct the processes”. 

He also disclosed that the federal government was working with the private to sector to raise money to create jobs for Nigeria’s teeming youth population.   

He said, “We are starting a programme we call Skill-to-Wealth that we are collaborating with the World Bank and other development institutions to develop. We are looking at the using the Nigerian markets so that we can raise money from the private sector to support social services.”

Yilwatda said other social protection systems in Nigeria included the pension scheme, Nigeria Social Trust Fund that protected workers who had work-related injuries or deaths.

Others, according to him, are the Industrial Training Fund that support youths with skills, training and job placements, as well as the health insurance scheme and others that form part of the social protection system for the vulnerable people in Nigeria.