Hunger: Akwa Ibom Targets 2.3m Poor Residents For Palliatives

Governor of Akwa Ibom State, Umo Eno, has expressed concern over the prevailing hardship in the state occasioned by the current socioeconomic meltdown and promised to reach out to 2.3 million poor people in 600,000 households for palliative intervention.

The households, LEADERSHIP gathered, are already captured in the state’s Social Register (SR) for various interventions programmes aimed at mitigating hunger and poverty afflicting many poor homes.

The commissioner for economic development, Mr Emem Bob, disclosed this in Uyo, the state capital yesterday while fielding questions on a special programme tagged; ‘ARISE Score Card’ with the theme: “Food Sufficiency and Security: The Intervention and Sustainability Strategy of Governor Umo Eno.”

Accompanied by the commissioner for information and strategy, Mr Ini Ememobong; the commissioner for agriculture, Dr Offiong Offor and the chairman, Akwa Ibom Bulk Purchase Agency, Mr Dan Akpan, Bob stressed the need to capture large number of the poor people in the population, which informed government’s decision to raise the beneficiaries to 2.3 million.

He said, “The social register is well- structured; it’s structured in such a way that we have broken the villages, wards and local local governments, these make up the state social register. And the total number of people we have in the social register is 2.3m as individuals.

“When you talk about households, we have about 600 households in the social register and that is what we have been using for various interventions in the state.”

He explained that the process for selection into the social register was very clear and transparent, adding that the social register has been there for the past eight years, but governor Umo Eno, only ordered that it should be expanded to accommodate those who have fallen under the poverty line.

“How people are selected for the SR, is very clear, it is a very transparent process in the sense that there is what we called community-based targeting (CBT). Don’t forget that anything that involves the World Bank, is very transparent; they are thorough.

“CBT is what was used for SR, and we have State Organizing Coordinating Units (SOCU), which works with the National Social Safety Nets Coordinator unit in Abuja, they work together and they have Staff across the local government. They go to villages, meet with village heads to pick these people,” he explained.

In the same vein, the commissioner for agriculture, Dr Offiong Offor, said the state government had put in place a lot of intervention programmes to boost food production and reduce the prices of foodstuffs in the state.

While calling on the people to heed the governor’s call and return to farming, the commissioner called on farmers to form themselves into cooperatives for easy access to funding.

“Food sustainability remains the priority of governor Umo Eno’s administration. The first thing is that the Ministry of Agriculture merged with the Ministry of Rural Development, which also has a component of cooperatives. He was deliberate in doing this because the cooperatives system is the system that is driving food productivity anywhere in the world,” she stressed.