Otti Assures Devt Partners of Commitment to Fighting Poverty in Abia

Governor Alex Otti has expressed the full commitment of his administration to fighting poverty in Abia State, saying that since inception eight months ago all its policies and programmes were geared towards winning the battle.

He made the promise at a meeting with a delegation of the European Union(EU) along with representatives of the International Labour Organisation(ILO) and other development partners.

The National Bureau of Statistics(NBS) puts the poverty index of Abia at 30 per cent, which is below the national average of 40.1 per cent.

But Otti was quoted in a press release by his Chief Press Secretary, Kazie Uko, to have assured the development partners on Tuesday that he would work assiduously to reduce poverty incidence to far below the present 30 percent.

The governor said that he would achieve the set goal within a year regardless of the population increase and its expected effect on the dynamics of poverty incidence.

"We may not be able to eliminate poverty but we can alleviate it when we create an enabling environment for businesses to grow and generate employment and pull people out of unemployment," he said.

Otti stated that: "We want to genuinely take people out of poverty" but he underscored the need for reliable statistics of the actual number of people below the poverty level.

He added: "Once you have a reliable database it becomes easy to plan and for you to measure," the governor said, adding, "we want to see the number and see the poverty rates go down even if the population is going high".

He thanked the team of development partners for considering Abia as one of the states selected for partnership for the project on social register and social protection.

According to him, Nigeria has "struggled with the social register" hence he expressed happiness at the intervention of the development partners, who "are talking about social register and social protection".

"There is nothing as important as data, because without data you cannot plan. So, we'll do everything possible to ensure that you do your work and generate reliable data for the purpose other than social protection," he said.

The Abia governor said that with the world already looking at the issue of multidimensional poverty, there was need to go beyond tackling poverty "as a stand-alone item, but poverty that looks at wealth, access to education and infrastructure".