By Bala Mohammed Liman
The All Progressives Congress (APC) came to power on May 29, 2015 on the change mantra. A major goal is to reduce the number of those living in extreme poverty. When the government was sworn in on May 29, 2015, the country’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) estimated that over 100 million Nigerians were living below the $1.25 per day benchmark of the United Nations. The level of poverty had been due to a lack of a clear cut policy to tackle the issue by previous governments that that had allowed funds meant for development projects to be misappropriated.
In order to address this, the APC in its campaign memorandum promised that it would introduce a programme that will target the very poor so as to lift them out of poverty and empower them. One way it intends to achieve this goal through the introduction of a Conditional Cash Transfer Programme.
The CCT is a programme that was introduced in many Latin American countries in the mid 1990s to alleviate the increasing poverty in many developing countries due to the effect of the Structural Adjustments Programmes of the 1980s. The World Bank noted that the CCTs ‘were programs that transfer cash, generally to poor households, on the condition that those households make prespecified investments in the human capital of their children Mexico was one of the first countries to introduce the programme, known as PROGRESA, in 1997.
It targeted 300,000 households with an initial budget of US$ 60 million. By the year 2009 the programme had grown to cover 5 million households with a budget of US$3 billion.
Other Latin American Countries soon adopted similar programmes with the Brazilian programme currently the largest, targeting 11 million families.
In his 2016 budget presentation, President Muhammadu Buhari announced the introduction of a CCT programme that will target those classified as the poorest and most vulnerable people in the country.
The beneficiaries will be given monthly payments of N5,000 based on certain conditions that includes ensuring that their children are enrolled in school and take part in free health services such as regular immunizations for diseases such as polio. The target is to increase school enrolment rates especially in the northern states where levels are still far below the national average. This will also ensure that the country begins to build a solid foundation for its youths through education.
The CCT programme will also boost health indicators with more under 5s immunized against the common illnesses that have ensured high under 5 and infant mortality rates in the country. To ensure the success of the programme, the President stated that the programme being proposed will be ‘’an implementable and transparent programme.
The CCT programme will also key the country into meeting some of the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) such as ending poverty in all its forms everywhere; achieving food security and reducing gender inequality.
However, the country has institutional and capacity gaps that will need to be addressed to ensure the success of the programme. Already there are such programmes in operation in the country albeit on a much smaller scale. One of such programmes is the In Care of The People (COPE) which was introduced in 2007.
There are three other schemes supported by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DfID), UNICEF and the World Bank being carried out in Kano, Bauchi and Katsina states. The aim of these programmes is to reduce the dropout rates amongst girls due to early marriage.
Both of the programmes are on a small scale compared to what the government is proposing but some of the issues regarding implementation and monitoring can be used as a basis to understanding the challenges that such a programme on a larger scale can face.
The first issue relates to lack of credible data to identify the poorest and most vulnerable which increases the risk of some of the poor and vulnerable falling through the cracks. There is currently no idea about the number of households that the programme intends to focus on, but if the figure of 25 million people that the APC quoted in its memorandum during the campaigns is anything to go by, then the programme will be overly ambitious. It might help if the programme starts with a pilot scheme that targets the poorest communities so that the problems can be assessed and corrected before it is rolled out on a national scale.
Another target of the policy is to increase school enrolment especially in the northern states where the numbers remain low. The current Universal Basic Education policy has not been able to achieve much success since it was introduced by President Obasanjo due to apathy to western education in the core Muslim areas of the country.
Will this fare any better? Only time will tell, but if sanctions or threats of withdrawal of this monthly stipend proves effective then we might see improvements in enrolment numbers.
The other issue relates to who gets the funds. The World Bank argued that women might be better at channeling these funds to the provision of education and health provision to the young since they are in many instances the primary carers.
The final and probably most important issue which the President seems to have identified that might be a problem is accountability and transparency. To mitigate against this there must be transparency regarding who determines the process of registration and how the funds are channeled to the poorest and the most vulnerable. This should help remove the spectre of clientelism that has been a feature of many programmes in this country to avoid the risk of the programme being high jacked by the elites in an effort to favour their constituencies.
If we can address these issues, then there is a very good chance that the programme will impact positively on the poorest. This should help increase living standards and improve development levels by pulling the poor out of the cycle of poverty that has become an entrenched feature of the Nigerian state.
Dr. Liman wrote this piece from Kaduna and can be reached at [email protected]
