The Nasarawa State government has opened up 45 rural roads through the World-Bank-funded Nigeria COVID-19 Action Recovery and Economic Stimulus (NG-CARES) programme.
The road projects are spread across the 13 local government areas of the state with over 100, 000 people benefiting.
This was disclosed by state coordinator of the programme, Mr. Umar Ibrahim Ayero, after an inspection tour of some of the projects.
Among the road projects, he said, include the 11 kilometer Bukan Fadama Agyaragu and five kilometer Kwandare-Awuma road in Lafia local government area.
He said 76 classrooms were built or rehabilitated while 89 primary healthcare facilities were built or rehabilitated under the programme.
Among the interventions in the education sector was the reconstruction of a block of three classrooms in Lafia South which project was raised midway but abandoned in 1975.
The coordinator said 73 solar-powered boreholes were constructed across all the local government areas of the state.
He noted that the intervention was also extended to agriculture, where over 11, 000 farmers benefitted from the project’s agriculture development initiative even as 6,000 less privileged persons receive 10,000 Naira monthly under conditional cash transfer to improve their livelihood.
LEADERSHIP reports that Nasarawa had come top in the implementation of the NG-CARES programme in the country.
The feat earned the state 10 percent, amounting to over 13 billion naira of the grant distributed to all the States of the federation in the World Bank assisted programme.
“Nasarawa State emerged first because of the result we have achieved, first in the country and also first in the North Central region. We came first because what we did for the rural economy is more than that of every state. So, normally, in this world bank programme we are running a P for R financing mechanism”.
“There are independent verifiers that go to every state to look at what you have done and then quantify your volume of achievement based on the amount that is given to you or allocated to each result that you’ve earned. After that exercise, Nasarawa State came first. And the result was converted to naira which amounted to 13.6billion naira,” he explained.
