‘How women are benefiting from Conditional Cash Transfer’

Dr Temitope Sinkaiye is the National Coordinator Conditional Cash Transfer programme of the Federal Government, a social safety net that gives N5,000 monthly to the poorest and vulnerable in the society. In this interview, she spoke on how the programme is helping to alleviate poverty by imparting skills to beneficiaries to enable them to be […]

Dr Temitope Sinkaiye is the National Coordinator Conditional Cash Transfer programme of the Federal Government, a social safety net that gives N5,000 monthly to the poorest and vulnerable in the society. In this interview, she spoke on how the programme is helping to alleviate poverty by imparting skills to beneficiaries to enable them to be self-reliant.

 

Tell us about the Conditional Cash Transfer programme?

The Conditional Cash Transfer is about transferring N5,000 monthly to the poor and vulnerable persons in Nigeria. The money is paid every two months, which totals N10,000 for each beneficiary. We also train them on life skills, savings and business development. The reason this training is mandatory for every beneficiary is so that they can have a sustainable livelihood at the end of the programme. Because they cannot be getting N5,000 monthly forever and the amount cannot even sustain them if they are not doing any business alongside it. 

The N5,000 is just to cushion their feeding while we build their capacity to have sustainable livelihood. The Federal Government has budgeted for one million poor and vulnerable households across the country and what we have done is to distribute this number by the wards, so all wards will have equal number of beneficiaries. 

How are the beneficiaries identified?

The beneficiaries are identified through a process that is known as community-based targeting. This means the community identifies who are the poorest because the programme is not just targeted at the poor but the poorest within the community. The poorest are those who are not able to have three square meals a day. And we all know that malnutrition is one of the challenges faced by people in Nigeria if you look at the statistics; though it’s higher in some regions than other regions. 

It is also to address the issue of human capital, like child and maternal mortality. If you look at the statistics, it’s quite high for Nigeria, so we need to reduce that. And in reducing that, every pregnant woman that is a beneficiary must attend antenatal, take all the immunisation and their children should also take all the immunisation. Then once they do this, they get additional support; the ones that have children of school age, we make sure their children go to school, at least the basic education level. So the programme is also addressing the human capital challenge for beneficiaries. We tell them, if you do this, you get this. If you don’t do it, you don’t get it. 

We divided the wards and each ward is supposed to have about a 100 beneficiaries. We are in 16 states across the country and these are the states that are ready. And what we mean by that is that, the state has to provide offices for the programme and then deploy staff for the programme. The programme is not asking the state and local governments to employ new staff. At the state level, we are asking for 14 staff and at the local government level we are asking for 10 staff per local government. 

The programme is bottom up, so the communities are the first to identify the beneficiaries which is passed on to us and we go to verify and after the verification, we enrol them into the programme, and then start the training. The training is at the community level so it is the local government staff who visit them there. The national office trains the staff from the states and local governments so they know.  

How long is this programme going to last?

The programme itself is for six years, but there are two sets of beneficiaries. We will graduate the first set of beneficiaries after three years, and bring in new ones from same community. The programme will benefit every community eventually. The states that are currently enjoying the Cash Transfer Programme are Bauchi, Borno, Cross River, Ekiti, Kogi, Kwara, Niger, Oyo and Osun. Those are the first set of states. The second set of states are Adamawa, Anambra, Plateau, Taraba, Gombe and Benue; making it 16 states. The third set of states, which we are just going to take up now, are Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Enugu and FCT. 

How is the money disbursed to the beneficiaries?

Initially, we started by using the commercial banks. Accounts were opened for the beneficiaries, but you know that where the majority of the poor live, there are no banks there, that was the initial challenge we had. 

What we are using now are the Mobile Money Operators (MMO) that are designed to take money to such areas; so it is mobile money operators that help pay the money. What we do is generate the list and send them to the Ministry of Budget and Planning and then the ministry sends it to the MMO who go to the community and pay the beneficiaries. They go there with the physical cash. We monitor the process to ensure that the people are paid. So far, we have had not issue with arrangement. 

Are there plans to increase the number of beneficiaries?

In fact, every month, the number is increasing as more states are coming on board.  We are still ramping up to one million. Remember, we have not covered all the states. The one million people that are to benefit from the programme are supposed to be across all the states. So, it’s only 16 out of the 36 states that we are in now. Now we have more than 300,000 households registered but the ones we have been paying since October are 70,000.  

How are the beneficiaries coping with the learning of skills that comes with the programme?

They are picking up and we have started seeing some changes because some of them have started saving. From the little they have they are acquiring small assets like stove and so on. Some start small businesses and those who have something doing have began to expand their businesses. 

Who are those that are getting the top-up (extra N10,000)?

Every beneficiary that is identified gets N5,000, which is paid two months en bloc (N10,000), because of the challenge of reaching them. If they were in places where things are structured, we would have been paying them monthly, but because they have to take the money to the communities, the logistics and cost of doing this monthly is high so we pay bi-monthly.

Then households with pregnant women, infants and children of school age, we top-up another N5,000 and that makes it N20,000 for two months for such beneficiary. The pregnant woman can go for antenatal, take children for immunisation, send children to school and this comes with a cost. 

This is aimed at reducing infant and maternal mortality. So, they must go to hospital, take all the immunisation, and as they are doing this, they get the top-up. If they fail in doing this, they will not get the top-up. They will get only the basic transfer. 

We monitor them by taking the records from hospitals, health centres and then for the school children, we take the records from the schools and for the environment, we take records from the sanitation officers.