The Federal Government says the implementation plan for effective commencement of its social investment programmes has reached an advanced stage.

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, who stated this on Tuesday, said the selection of the first 200,000 unemployed graduates for teaching jobs was being completed.

Addressing a group of radio journalists and producers at the Presidential Villa in Abuja, Osinbajo said: “We expect that before the end of the month, we will engage 200,000 out of the 500,000 unemployed graduates the Buhari administration plans to hire in the N-Power jobs programme.

"The direct government job is meant to keep these young people occupied, pay them some amounts of money and also give them a device which will also help them to learn several skills that they can develop as time goes on. We expect that before the end of this month, we should have engaged 200,000 of them, and we are hoping that before the end of the year, we should have engaged more.”

The vice president equally said that the home-grown school feeding programme, earlier scheduled to begin last month, was set to kick off in several states this month.

He stated: “Definitely, before the end of this month, we expect that several states would have come on stream with their home-grown School feeding programme. The programme will energise agriculture in the different states because it is what you plant that you feed the children with.

"We'll be hiring caterers, cooks, etc in each state because it'll be Federal Government-funded from primary 1-3 and the state governments, hopefully, would be able to cater for the other classes. The home-grown school feeding programme is another section of the social investment programmes that impact directly on the lives of Nigerian children and families.

Several states will start implementing it before the end of October."

Osinbajo added that the micro-credit scheme; in which very low-cost loans would be given to more than one million artisans, traders, market women and others ranging from N60,000 to N100,000; would also kick off this month.

According to the vice president, the micro-credit scheme is aimed at boosting the beneficiaries' businesses.

“For women across the country, we're giving loans, micro credit loans to about 1.5 million women. We're focusing on market women and artisans, loans between N60,000 and 100,000 each. We're working through the Bank of Industry (BOI). They're going to be giving out these loans, we have already identified the banks and everybody who is involved in this. We should be flagging-off hopefully before the end of this month,” he said.

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