FG expands, restructures N-Power, GEEP scheme

The Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development has expanded and restructured two of its poverty alleviation and youth empowerment schemes, Government Enterprise Empowerment Programme (GEEP) and N-POWER, under the National Social Investment Programme (NSIP), which have been flagged off at major events in Abuja.

A statement from ministry indicated that the repackaged schemes include raising the number of N-Power beneficiaries to one million beginning with the resumption of the previously stalled N-Power Batch C, now in two streams CI and C2, the first of which was flagged off with 450,000 graduate and 60,000 non-graduate components and refocusing of the three arms of the

GEEP-TraderMoni, MarketMoni and FarmerMoni to exclusively target marginalized youth, vulnerable women and rural farmers respectively as GEEP 2.0.

“GEEP 2.0 has been expanded to provide soft loans and skills to an additional one million beneficiaries with emphasis on small holder farmers in the 2020/2021 year as well as unbanked poor and vulnerable but skilled citizenry usually left out of credit delivery programmes. Its implementation model accommodates representation at federal, state and local government levels,” the statement stated

The ministry explained that the loan portfolio for TraderMoni and MarketMoni have been increased from N10,000 to N50,000 while FarmerMoni will now attract N300,000 with provision for value chain and creation of digital market place for beneficiaries to sell their produce.