The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, Professor Nentawe Yilwatda, has revealed that the federal government has reached out to six million Nigerians for its conditional cash transfer scheme in six months.
Yilwatda made this known while speaking on Thursday in Jos to beneficiaries of the ongoing Skills-to-Wealth (S2W) Training Programme, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports.
“In six months, we have reached out to six million people; it simply means that we are doing one million people per month,” he said.
He stated that the ministry had greatly expanded the program’s reach in comparison to previous years.
The minister noted that six million Nigerians have benefited from the programme within the last six months.
The minister added that 15 million Nigerians would be enrolled under the programme by October.
“The President wants to ensure that before October, we can support 15 million households.
“The president has directed that we should ensure that that money reached these people in nine months,” he explained.
According to him, “Only two million people benefited from the conditional cash transfer in the past; it simply means that in nine years of that programme, just 200,000 people benefited in a year.”
FG to digitalise social register
Yilwatda explained that FG has adopted digital strategies to improve the programme’s efficiency and transparency.
According to him, “We are in the process of digitising all the homes of people on the social register, giving them a digital identity, creating e-wallets account for them, and carrying out physical verification.
“We have removed a lot of names from the social register that have errors. They are not known, and we couldn’t verify and identify them and their homes within the social register,” the Minister stated.
To ensure credibility and transparency, the ministry engaged the World Bank to conduct an independent verification of the programme’s implementation.
“After we delivered to the first four million people, I asked the World Bank to set up an independent team to do a verification of these people we are paying.
“We wanted to be sure that we are doing the right thing, and the result revealed that the people we paid were actually on the social register.
“They visited the homes of the beneficiaries and met 96 per cent of them in person.
He added that the remaining four per cent were unverified due to their locations in hard-to-reach areas or displacement caused by insecurity.
“The remaining four per cent that they couldn’t verify are those in hard-to-reach areas and those who migrated due to insecurity,” Yilwatda stated.
On the Skills-to-Wealth (S2W) initiative, Yilwatda said the programme is designed to empower Nigerian youths in three key sectors: agriculture, renewable energy, and automobile technology.
What you should know
Nigeria is home to 19% of the extremely poor population in sub-Saharan Africa, the highest share across the region, according to the World Bank’s April 2025 Africa’s Pulse report.
Nigeria’s 19% share of this figure means over 106 million Nigerians live in extreme poverty.
This translates to about 15% of the entire world’s poorest people, highlighting the depth of the poverty crisis in Africa’s largest economy.
This means that more than 1 in every 7 of the world’s poorest people lives in Nigeria, raising urgent questions about the country’s development path.
The conditional cash transfer programme commenced in September 2016.
