The minister for Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management, Hajiya Sadiya Farouq says following the directive by President Muhammadu Buhari that palliatives be rolled out to Nigerians to cushion the effect of the lockdown of some parts of the nation, part of the measure to identify beneficiaries would be to look at people with less than N5 000 in their accounts.
She said this would be achieved by taking a look at the BVN holders and people who buy N100 worth of airtime with their banks.
“You are aware that the President in his broadcast of Monday 13th April, directed that we expand the beneficiaries of the conditional cash transfer by one million and in this regard, we are going to focus more now on the urban poor.
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“These are people who depend on the informal sector to earn their livelihood; they are daily wage earners and these are the people that we are really going to focus more on as well as people living with disabilities.”
Giving details on how to identify the beneficiaries of the stimulus, she said that the Ministry has three options to be adopted in selecting the beneficiaries of the scheme.
She said, “Well, we have three options; one, we are going to use the national social register that we already have, two, we are also going to focus on the urban poor as I mentioned, by using their verified BVN accounts to get them, that is, people that have an account balance of N5, 000 and below.
“We are also using the mobile networks, to know people that top up the credit units for their phones with may be N100 or less. Those are also people that we consider to be poor and vulnerable. So, these are the three options that we are exploring and I am sure that by the time we get this data we will be able to give this intervention.”
