By Chimezie Godfrey
The Federal government has begun training of 350 agents for Mobile Money Transactions in the North West zone of the country.
The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development Sadiya Farouq who flagged off the training programme on Monday at the Coronation Hall, Government House, Kano State said that the youth empowerment event is specially designed to address youth restiveness, generate gainful employment and create wealth nationwide.
Farouq added that President Muhammadu Buhari’s Administration has paid more attention towards alleviating poverty amongst the vulnerable in the country.
She said,”In the last 5 years, over 12 million households have benefitted from NSIP interventions. In view of the life-changing experience of beneficiaries of NSIP, President Buhari has graciously approved the expansion of the programme in all the clusters mainly to ensure that more lives are lifted out of poverty.
“The Mobile Money Agents’ Programme was introduced in 2020 to sustain the social inclusion agenda of President Buhari’s Administration. It is consistent with the President’s vision of lifting 100 million Nigerians out of poverty by 2030.
“The programme is designed to empower unemployed youths and develop their competence to operate as registered mobile money agents. This training will enable these beneficiaries to meet the minimum technical and business requirements for becoming mobile money agents and enhance their entrepreneurial competence to successfully start and manage mobile money businesses”.
Earlier, the state Focal Person Baba Aminu Zubair stated in his goodwill message, that Kano state has mostly benefited from federal government’s Social Investment Programmes.
Aminu Zubair said that 11 schools currently have STEM Centres with 214 students as beneficiaries while 154,000 poor and vulnerable from 15 Local government councils received Conditional Cash Transfer.
The State Focal Person thanked the Federal government and the minister for the training of 60 Mobile Money Agents in the state while enumerating Kano state’s gains from government’s Social Investment Programmes.
“Kano state has 10 National Home Grown School Feeding Program aggregators, 12,258 cooks and vendors and 1,225,804 pupils receiving one nutritious meal each, under the school feeding program.
“We had 18,000 beneficiaries under N-Power Batches A& B and
13,000 under Batch C as well as 296 Independent Monitors.
“Under GEEP 1.0, 250,000 beneficiaries in Kano state received interest-free loans while registration for GEEP 2.0 is ongoing.
88,400 rural women also benefited from government’s N20,000 one-off grant”.
After the five- day training , the beneficiaries will be formally registered with the Shared Agency Network Expansion Facility (SANEF) as Mobile Money Agents and will be provided with start-up Kits including
a Point-of-Sale (POS) Machine,
Fingerprint Scanner, chairs, tables and umbrellas and a token of N20,000.00.
A total of 1,850 youths selected from the 36 States and the FCT will be trained in payments through the network of agents providing financial-related services under other components of NSIP with 350 of them from the North West states namely Kaduna, Katsina, Kano, Kebbi, Sokoto, Jigawa,, Zamfara.
