Federal Government has said that The beneficiaries of the N-power scheme will henceforth serve for less than two years.
Sadiya Umar Farouq, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development who disclosed this in Abuja on Wednesday (yesterday), at an inter-ministerial dialogue, said this was part of the restructuring of the scheme which the government was set to undertake to make the N-power programme more efficient. She said her ministry had undertaken a review and re-appraisal of the programme in order to strengthen its design and streamline it for efficiency.
N-Power which is a job creation and empowerment initiative of the Social Investment Programme, N-SIP, of the Federal Government of Nigeria, was designed to help young Nigerians acquire and develop life-long skills to become solution providers in their communities and to become players in the domestic and global markets. Through N-Power, young Nigerians will be empowered with the necessary tools to go on and create, develop, build, fix and work on exceptional ideas, projects and enterprises that will change our communities, our economy and our nation.
According to Sadiya, part of the reforms and streamlining will see a reduction in tenure, launch of the Integrated National Social Investment Programme which is intended to reposition N-SIP to cater to vulnerable groups in society by providing them access to shock responsive interventions, life skills & mentorship in order to systematically lift people out of poverty.
Sadiya further stated that other reforms included enrolling more women on the programme to empower them so that they could earn an income and be more self-sufficient.
The minister also said the session came to a conclusion that attention would be paid on how to convert knowledge into skills while providing opportunities for them to digitalise and organise markets, adding that the core emphasis of the National Social Investment Programmes (N-SIP), will be on the youths who accounted for 70 million of the Nigerian population.
Uresolved issues
The proposed reduction in the duration of the programme comes amidst the controversy trailing over 200,000 beneficiaries selected in 2016, under Batch-A who ought to have been disengaged from the scheme after the mandatory two years of internship.
Similarly, there have been consistent outcry from volunteers over delay or non-payment of their monthly allowances although the minister had admitted that her ministry encountered challenges with the Government Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS) which caused the delay.
“We encountered some delays on the GIFMIS platform but I can now announce that all N-Power beneficiaries from Batch A and B have been paid their April stipends,” the minister had explained.
But Vivian Ezike, an N-Power beneficiary, who appeared on Channels TV on Tuesday said she and many colleagues are yet to recieve their stipends since March.
In the interview, she also explained other logistic challenges the beneficiaries face, urging the officials to tackle these.
