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From John Adams, Minna
The Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs has given the assurance that the ongoing nationwide physical enumeration exercise for pupils under the school feeding programme will go ahead in spite of the security challenges in some parts of the country.
Hajiya Fatima Bissala, Team Leader for the enumeration exercise in charge of Niger State, gave the assurance while speaking with reporters shortly after the physical capturing of pupils at Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida (IBB) primary school in Minna, the Niger State capital.
Hajiya Bissala acknowledged the fact that the security challenges in parts of Niger for example is enormous, with about ten local government areas under siege from bandits, all necessary measures to ensure proper enumeration of pupils in schools within the affected areas have been taken.
‘We have gone into synergy with the National Orientation Agency (NOA) and the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) for their staff to handle the enumeration exercise in those areas.’
According to her, ‘the National Orientation Agency Officials and the Corp members are there in all the local government areas in the country and they have equally being trained to be able to handle the exercise effectively. They gave us daily update on what they are able to captured.’
She pointed out that with this arrangements, the security challenges will not affect the enumeration exercise, stressing that ‘the essence of the exercise to ascertain the actual number of pupils that are benefitting from the home grown school feeding in the country.’
Hajiya Bissala disclosed that at the moment, no fewer than 559,960 pupils across 2,636 primary schools in the 25 local government areas of the state are benefitting from the school feeding programme.
In addition to this, she said 5,960 cooks are under the pay roll of the school feeding programme, stressing that ‘the enumeration exercise will also cover the cooks. All these is to enable us have physical capturing of each pupil and cook.’
She stated further that the ongoing enumeration exercise will last for three weeks
