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Nigeria has captured more than Sixty Million Poor and Vulnerable individuals in the nation’s Social Register and also mapped out strategies to institutionalize the continues registration system at states and Local Governments levels for sustainability purposes.
National Coordinator, National Social Safety- Nets Co-coordinating Office NASSCO, Mallam Danladi Suleiman Abdulhazeez stated this at a three day training programme in Kaduna to develop the guidelines towards institutionalizing the programme across the 36 states of the Federation and Abuja.
Represented by Mr. Mohammed Dikko Bala Head National Social Register in the NASSCO Office Abuja, the National co-coordinator explained that the project which is supported by World Bank started in 2016 with a total of 800 people across 8 states but has now spread to all the 36 states and Abuja.
“We inherited the legacy data that had closed years back with a total of 800 people across 8 states in 2016, we now continue from there and as it is today in terms of coverage, we are in 36 states and then in 747 LGAs over 8000 wards, close to 16 million households which translates to over 60 million individuals in the register cutting across all states of the federation including Abuja”
Mallam Danladi Suleiman Abdulhazeez said the National Social Safety Project NASSP has 2 components which are; the National Social Safety- Nets Co-odinating Office where the social register is built and the National Cash Transfer Office which mined beneficiaries from the register to give the intervention to at the various states.
He emphasized that the project is financed by World Bank and the Federal Government while implementation is being carried out by States and Local Governments but the process of identifying the poor and vulnerable beneficiaries is the responsibility of the community because of contextual differences in identifying who should be a beneficiary.
“NASSCO is a world bank and federal government finance project and we are into coordinating all the Social safety Nets systems, the national social register is an aggregate of all the 36 states including Abuja register so the real implementation and building up of the register is being champion by the state and then cascaded down to the community because it is really a community driven project where the process of identification is done by the community because the communities now identify first of all set criteria for poverty within their community context and then go ahead to select who are poor among them. So it’s a process where we do a targeting mechanism, the geographical targeting and the community based targeting”
In a presentation, Senior Officer on Policy and Stakeholder Engagement Advisor with Save The Children Intenational Mr.Yimave Terkura Gyanggyang said the training was for the participating states to develop guidelines that will help institutionalized the Social Protection Programmes in the various states which are Benue, Kano, Jigawa, Kaduna and Zamfara.
Mr. Yimave Terkura Gyanggyang advised the various states to decide whether their States Operations Coordinating Offices SOCU, should either be a Unit, a Department or an Agency as the whole idea was to mainstream the SOCU activities into the Civil Sercvice.
“When you are talking about institutionalizing SOCU what would you want it to be? Would you want it to be a Department, a Unit or an Agency and where will you have it fixed? The whole idea is to mainstream or bring up a process that will help in mainstreaming SOCU in the civil service and this is mainly for sustainability because NASSP is a project so what happened if the project ends today”
