Director National Orientation Agency (NOA) Niger state chapter, Hamza Audu has disclosed that the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) could not deploy corps members to 11 LGAs in the state owing to escalating banditry in the areas.
Hamaza Audu stated this during the visit of a monitoring team from the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management to the state,Tuesday, for the enumeration of pupils and cooks also known as vendors under the Home Grown School Feeding Programme of the federal government.
He said corps members were not deployed to 11 local governments prone to bandits attacks, adding that “we are using the locals in concerned schools, who are conversant with their environment in order not to put the lives of NYSC members at risk.”
Speaking to journalists in Minna, Hajiya Fatima Bisalla, who led the monitoring team from the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management, said the exercise was aimed at generating accurate data on the beneficiaries.
According to her, “The federal government wants to know the accurate number of pupils and cooks in each state before we scale up the programme to include more pupils in September.”
She said the team is satisfied with what it had seen on ground in Niger in connection with the records presented by the state on the school feeding programme.
She explained that the enumeration exercise was being carried out in collaboration with the National Orientation Agency (NOA) and the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC).
The Niger state coordinator of the programme, Barrister Amina Gu’ar expressed satisfaction with the quality of food being served to pupils by the vendors.
She explained that 560,000 pupils from 3,032 schools are benefitting from the scheme in the state while over 5,000 food vendors have been engaged.
