The World Food Programme (WFP), has pledged to support President Bola Tinubu’s Zero Hunger Programme under the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation.
The Country Director of WFP, David Stevesson, made this known on Thursday, when he led a team of the United Nations agency to visit the Minister for Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Dr. Betta Edu in her office.
Stevesson, disclosed that 2.1 million Nigerians have already been captured as beneficiaries of the program with the hope to expand working with the minister of humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation.
He pledged WFP’s support to the federal government’s humanitarian and poverty intervention efforts including the food security agenda and the Zero Hunger Programme among others.
“I’ve been very impressed in such a short time to hear about the Minister’s leadership, putting together the strategy for the Ministry.
“We talked about zero hunger, we talked about the humanitarian hubs in every local government area in the country, we talked about the world food programs, the potential to support those hubs through buying food locally and also assisting in the cash transfer and food. These are very impressive.
“Let me announce here that the World Food Programme is committed to spending $2.5Billion To Fight Hunger in Nigeria in the next five years”, the WFP boss said.
Responding, Edu commended the WFP Country Director for the visit and the kind comments about her.
The Minister informed Stevesson that there were over 133 million people in Nigeria affected by multidimensional poverty, stressing that WFP’s intervention of $2.5 billion for five years, “will go a long way to address some of the biggest challenges the country is facing, which is hunger.”
According to the Minister, “Zero Hunger” was one of the projects her Ministry had initiated as part of poverty and humanitarian response efforts, and appealed to the WFP to key into it by working with the Ministry to achieve results.
Edu explained that Homegrown School Feeding was one aspect of the Zero Hunger Project, saying the Ministry would be working on different nutritional programs that would target both pregnant women, children under five, school feeding, feeding of persons who are affected by humanitarian crises, aged and the persons of concern, “including refugees that have found themselves within our space.”
“We have over 80,000 persons as refugees presently, in Nigeria. The state I come from alone, there are over 40,000 refugees and these are just those who are registered.
“Part of the innovation which we are bringing on board is what we call humanitarian hub because we want to create 774 of these humanitarian hubs in each local government across Nigeria ” she added
Kuni Tyessi
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