Senior Special Assistant to VP Yemi Osinbajo on Media and Publicity,
Laolu Akande, has explained how the Presidency picked beneficiaries of
the N5000 stipend for vulnerable Nigerians.
Akande in the statement released yesterday, said the Community-Based
Targeting (CBT) model of the World Bank was used in 2015 to identify
most of the beneficiaries.
According to Akande, the vulnerable Nigerians had
been picked by the last administration during an exercise carried out by
World bank which was certainly devoid of any manipulations or fraud.
Akande said in eight of the nine pilot states, the process had taken
place at least two years ago through the World Bank-supported programme
under an agreement entered into with the state governments.
“This is an entirely fair and transparent process and short of mischief,
there is no way you can describe this process as partisan. The
president is president of the entire country and the SIPs are for all
Nigerians as the case may be. First, the officials at federal level,
working with the state officials, identify the poorest local government
areas, using an existing poverty map for the state, then the local
officials identify the poorest communities in the LGAs and we send our
teams there. The first thing our team does after selection of the LGAs
is to select members of the NOA, the LGA and community officials to form
the CBT team. Then we train the selected officials on how to conduct
focus group discussions at community level. These focus groups comprise
women, men, youths as the community determines. After training them, the
CBT teams go to each of their communities to sensitize the leaders,
including traditional rulers, on the CBT process and the necessity for
objectivity and openness in the process. At that meeting, they firm up a
date to convene a community meeting at a designated location within the
community. On the set date, discussions are held in the local
languages, using terminologies that resonate in that community. The CBT
team will explain to the community the purpose of the gathering; that
is, to determine the parameters of poverty upon which persons can be
described as poor and vulnerable within the context of that community.
The CBT teams will then engage each group (men, women and youths) in the
conversation around the criteria and parameters for determining the
poorest people. The groups would then be encouraged to identify those
households that fall within the criteria that the community itself
determines, and told that the information is required for government’s
planning purposes. Various poverty criteria have been thrown up so far.
In some cases, people have said it’s the number of times they eat, it’s
the number of times the fumes of firewood go up from the house, the size
of farmland or type of crops grown. Then, the groups resume in plenary
and report back the criteria and parameters discussed. The CBT team
would then compile the criteria and parameters and ask each group to
return to their break-out sessions and now begin to identify the
households in the community that have been identified as fitting the
criteria and parameters. Once that’s done at the groups, everybody comes
together again with names compiled by each group. Now, when the same
name is featured in at least two of the three groups, it is deemed
qualified to be listed on the social register. At this stage, we now
enumerate the members of the household and open a bank account for each
of the care-givers by capturing the biometric data of households
identified as among the poorest and vulnerable.”