AYO ESAN
THE Federal Government has commenced engagement with the six states of the South West geo-political zone and Civil Societies Organisations working on Social Protection to harness their inputs into the National Social Protection Policy.
This is to ensure that everyone is carried along in the review of the policy as recommended in the Sustainable Development Goal.
The Permanent Secretary, Budget and National Planning and Chairperson, Technical Working Group, Olusola Idowu, made this disclosure during a Stakeholders’ Consultation and Sensitisation Workshop for the South West Zone.
The Federal Government has so far established four social protection programmes under the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari.
They are the Cash Transfer Programme, National Home Grown School Feeding Programme, Job Creation and Government Empowerment and Enterprise Programme.
Idowu said that the workshop, organised in collaboration with Save the Children was to specifically harvest input from the South West Zone.
She also stated that the designed process consultation, sensitisation and validation would also be repeated before the draft policy was eventually finalised and pushed for approval by the Federal Executive Council and later legislated on by the National Assembly.
Also speaking, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on SDG, Adejoke Orelope- Adefulure, disclosed that through technical partnership with the UNDP Nigeria, the government was supporting the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory to develop medium- and long-term SDG-based development aspirations of the states.
She also advised that the development of Social Protection Policy should start from the needs, realities and priorities of the group that they were intended to benefit; noting that a range of factors contributed to the creation of policy and programme systems responsive to the needs of the poor.
According to Adefulure, public policy for social protection needs to strike a balance between measures designed to prevent shocks, which all have negative impacts on the poor.
