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Laraba MUREY
The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Dr. Betta Edu, has hinted at the establishment of a Presidential Humanitarian and Poverty Alleviation Trust Fund to address poverty and humanitarian crises in the country.
Edu, who disclosed this during an interactive session with the Country Director of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mr. Jeremie Zoungrana, solicited for the foundation’s technical and financial support towards achieving the feat.
According to her, the trust fund will bring together financial contributions from the government, private sector, and donor agencies to facilitate effective and timely interventions for humanitarian issues and poverty reduction.
The minister who noted that the government has a huge task on its hands, said over 16 million Nigerians are affected by humanitarian crises, either man-made or the natural disasters, adding that security issues, pockets of unrest in different areas have not made this any better.
“Other natural disasters like the flooding, which we are presently going through, and the opening of a Dam in another country, which will have its own effect on Nigeria, is another call for attention to ensure that people are catered for.
“First, we would need a lot of technical help. Technical help to see that we can draw a baseline, set the agenda and come up with programmes and projects that can be implemented to really lift people out of poverty while addressing the humanitarian needs.
“Secondly, we would also need lots of financial help in terms of supporting programmes, supporting processes, and helping with implementation. While it starts with one of the innovations we want to put on board, that’s the Presidential Humanitarian and Poverty Alleviation Trust Fund.
“Now, we need to be able to go full-blown into a robust resource mobilization; move that can help us pull together funding into one basket that will be used to address both the humanitarian crises and the poverty alleviation programs and projects without necessarily going through the bureaucratic bottlenecks of government,” she said.
Edu stated that the country must be innovative enough to find a way around the crises and that’s why establishment of the Trust Fund is crucial.
“Now it’s a Trust Fund that Nigeria would put a skin in the game so we’ll put our monies into the Trust Fund so from the budgetary allocation, from special intervention funds Nigeria will be putting into this basket.
“Now beyond this, we are looking at Donor Agencies, Development Partners coming into this space. We’re also looking at harnessing the private sector to come into the space and support us.
“And we are also not just asking for free support or free money from the private sector, we are ready to work with the Ministry of Finance to offer them like tax rebates. And the rest of it if they’re supporting this Trust Fund, as part of their corporate social responsibility, and other subheads which they can use to support the Trust Fund.”
“Like I said Donors, like you Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as Development Partners will be brought on board. We’re looking at also earmarking part of the tax, if you have followed through, you see that there’s an increased tax on some commodities, especially sugar tax and the rest of them that were approved by the Federal Government and the National Assembly had that passed, however, it’s not been earmarked.
“So, we’re actually looking at earmarking those taxes to support humanitarian response as well as poverty alleviation. Other sources we’ll be working with Embassies and other Countries that want to be part of this support?
“We can equally go into the Middle East to really pull support from Foundations and individuals that are happy to support the country in this drive,” she said.
Also speaking, the Country Director of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mr. Jeremie Zoungrana, who applauded the minister’s laudable initiative and proactiveness, reiterated commitment towards various health-related programmes in Nigeria.
Zoungrana said the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is working in different areas which will also contribute to the minister’s mission and one of those areas is health.
“We want to make sure that everyone lives a very productive and healthy life and in terms of health fees, when you are not healthy, you cannot be productive and when you are not productive, you end up being poor.
“Everything that we link to is linked to that but also, we want to make sure that we offer opportunity to everyone to contribute to the life and the opportunity is really to reduce poverty.
“So, poverty is another area that we are trying to contribute to by investing in economic opportunities for agriculture, through financial inclusion. And of course, the Gender is another aspect, a lot of cross-cutting, digitalization, innovation, you know, across different things, but we do understand that humanitarian and poverty alleviation is also a very important aspect as I mentioned previously,” he said.
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