The Federal Government has stated that the redesigned N-Power initiative would be designed to create jobs for at least five million youths in the country.
According to Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Betta Edu, who was speaking on Sunday Politics on Channels Television, the N-Power initiative is a component of the safety net program designed to prevent people from falling into poverty.
“What our ministry is doing is to provide a social safety net that prevents these people from falling into poverty and trying to pull as many as possible that into poverty out of poverty.
“We have mapped out different programs, National programs, that is expected to address the issue of multi-dimensional poverty. Of course, we have the N-Power which is supposed to create 5 million jobs in 5 years.
“We have several other projects that are lined up, all of them are targeted at the different dimension of poverty,” she said.
The N-Power was a component of the National Social Investment Programme (NSIP), a program launched by the former president Muhammadu Buhari on June 26, 2016, to combat youth unemployment and promote social development. The N-Power initiative engaged over 360,000 people.
The Humanitarian Ministry on Saturday said in a statement that the Federal Government has suspended the N-Power program indefinitely.
According to the ministry, some anomalies were found within the scheme which led to its suspension.
In the redesigned programme, the Minister noted that the target age range would be between 18 and 40.
“We are working on five million Nigerian youth between the ages of 18 and 40 and this will be taken 1 million per year. On the Jeep program, we’re working on 1.5 million Nigerians,” she said.
She stressed that the N-Power program would be open to all applicants equally and on a first-come-first-serve basis.
“N-Power everyone who applies would be based on first-come-first-serve. As far as you meet the criteria for each category, you would be given a chance on first-come-first-serve and the servers can confirm what is a quota for each state. So, we are not necessarily going to allocate quotas to states,” she added.
