THE Federal Government has disbursed more than ₦600 billion in cash transfers to vulnerable Nigerians over the past three years, Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, Bernard Doro, has said.
News Point Nigeria reports that Doro disclosed this during an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Wednesday, saying the intervention had reached slightly more than 10 million households.
“We’ve done over 600 billion in cash transfers to be able to support vulnerable Nigerians within three years. We have reached slightly over 10 million households,” he said.
The minister’s comments came after the Federal Government launched its $1 billion Renewed Hope Social Protection Programme, aimed at moving vulnerable Nigerians beyond temporary relief towards sustainable economic empowerment.
The programme, unveiled by First Lady Oluremi Tinubu, includes the Household Prosperity and Empowerment Social Protection Project (HOPE-SP), which seeks to establish a coordinated social protection system focused on helping households move out of poverty.
Doro said the new programme would adopt a different approach to poverty reduction by deliberately tracking households and measuring their progress towards economic self-reliance.
“We have a system where we want to deliberately track poverty,” he said.
According to the minister, the programme is expected to strengthen the coordination of humanitarian interventions, social protection and poverty reduction, while placing households at the centre of government support.
The HOPE-SP initiative targets about 7.6 million vulnerable households nationwide. Eligible households are expected to receive a one-off digital shock-response transfer of ₦40,000.
Beneficiaries must be registered on the National Social Register and validated with their National Identification Number (NIN), with the government working with the National Identity Management Commission to ease NIN registration and strengthen verification.
Defending the government’s economic reforms, Doro said the removal of petrol subsidy had contributed to greater stability in the economy, arguing that the impact of the reforms should ultimately be judged by Nigerians.
He also rejected claims that seven million Nigerians had fallen into poverty under the administration, saying the government was working to bring inflation down and rebuild the economy.
Doro compared Nigeria’s poverty-reduction challenge with China’s experience, noting that it took the Asian country decades to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
“It took China 40 years to achieve the scale they achieved, Nigeria can scale up poverty reduction,” he said.
He added that the reforms introduced by President Bola Tinubu’s administration had helped the country begin rebuilding its economy.