Senior Special Assistant to the president on the Millennium Development Goals, MDGs, Dr. Precious Gbeneol has said that her agency is collaborating with the Benue State government to empower women as part of its national programme aimed at reducing extreme poverty and hunger in the country.
Dr. Gbeneol who stated this during the visit of wife of the Benue State governor, Architect Dooshima Suswam in her office, explained that the collaboration became necessary to fight against poverty and in view of the fast approaching 2015 UN deadline for attainment of the MDGs.
“We plan to scale up our work in health, education, water and sanitation sectors through the 2013 Conditional Grants Scheme since this have the potential to impact the lives of the most vulnerable.
“We are reaching more than 56,000 households in 24 states using the 2012 DRGs Budget and will be scaling up to cover more states of the federation with the 2013 Budget,” Gbeneol said.
Earlier, Mrs. Suswam said the Sev-Av Foundation, which is her brainchild, is already doing a lot in the area of empowerment of women by equipping them with life changing skills in vocations like tailoring, catering among others.
She added that Sev-Av Foundation had trained about 800 in different vocations and they had started using such skills to better their lives.
“We are collaborating with the wives of the Northern Governors Forum, which is focusing on the area of polio eradication and reduction of violence against women. Together we will ensure that Nigeria beats the 2015 deadline,” she said.
It would be recalled that in 2011 Benue State received the sum of N701, 819,304 from the MDGs office with the governor contributing half of the amount as counterpart fund that was invested in the development of local councils in the state.
In 2012 three local councils in Benue received N100 million each, which has been counterpart-funded.