The Hon. Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Umar-Farouq, had flagged off the scheme yesterday in Abuja, she said the graduates would be placed on a monthly stipends of N30,000 for a period of one year while the non-graduate beneficiaries will earn N10,000 monthly stipends for a period of nine months.
The federal government has flagged off the N-Power Batch C Stream 1 Programme for the 36 states of the federation including the FCT with 510,000 volunteers.
Under the scheme, a total of 450,000 people are selected under the graduate component, while 60,000 beneficiaries will be a non-graduate N-Power volunteer corps
The Minster said all the beneficiaries were granted an appropriate starter pack for their trade to enable them to start their businesses in their chosen trades.
The graduate programme is further sub-divided into N-Teach under which volunteers are trained and attached as assistant teachers in primary schools, the N-Agro volunteers are attached as extension agents to support farmers to obtain better performance, while the N-Health volunteers are trained and attached to work as public health assistants mainly in public primary healthcare facilities.
The N-Health volunteers are also trained to provide basic diagnostic services in the Primary Health Care Development Centres and will teach preventive healthcare to community members, including pregnant women, children, families and individuals especially in rural areas.
According to the Hon. Minister Sadiya Umar-Farouq “The Non-Graduate progra-mme targets youth in the age bracket of 18-35 with a minimum of secondary school education. The programme seeks to deliver skills to job/enterprise through accelerated training and certification. They are trained, tooled and transitioned to take up jobs as electrical installation technicians, plumbing and pipe-fitting installers, masons, carpentry and joinery experts, automobile technicians, agric technicians and hospitality experts,”.
She emphasized that President Muhammadu Buhari administration’s unwavering efforts in eradicating poverty in Nigeria and for supporting and sustaining the National Social Investment Programme (NSIP) recognised the creativity and impact of the N-Power and has graciously approved the expansion of the programme from 500,000 to 1,000,000 beneficiaries, to enable more young people to benefit.
The Minister said the N-Power programme deploys an online application and selection strategy to ensure fairness, transparency and credibility in the recruitment process, adding the programme commenced in the Office of the Vice President back in June 2016 when the application portal was first opened. Over 750,000 applications were received, out of which, 200,000 beneficiaries were screened and selected into the first batch called Batch A. The portal was opened again in June 2017 where over 2.5 million applications were received, from which another 300,000 volunteers were selected into the programme as Batch B.
Therefore all the Npower Batch C Beneficiaries are urged to visit their Nasims portal to re-update their records.
