|
BNW |
|
B N W: Biafra Nigeria World News |
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
U.S. agency begins N59b economic scheme for Nigeria
A NEW five-year economic strategy to help Nigeria realise its developmental plans has been started by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The new assistance, according to the agency's director in Nigeria Mrs Don Liberi, is to gulp about N59.8 billion ($60 million). It is an offshoot of the $320 million "transition strategy investment" programme, which signalled the renewal of full bilateral assistance from the United States (U.S.) in 1999 and ended last year.
Liberi told The Guardian in Abuja at the weekend that the new grant agreement with the National Planning Commission (NPC) was designed to enhance general economic growth by complementing corporate long-term planning and assisting Nigerian partners in agriculture, democracy and governance, basic education and health-care, child survival as well as nutrition, malaria prevention and Human Immuno-deficiency Virus/Acquired Immune (HIV/AIDS). It will end in 2009.
According to Liberi, the new grant "represents the largest assistance programme in sub-saharan Africa. Of course, there are other programmes that have humanitarian relief components like you have in the Sudan in food and aid but in terms of the formal development assistance project, this is clearly the largest, again, it in recognition of Nigeria's economic power and regional importance."
USAID invests approximately $100 million yearly in Nigeria but Liberi lamented that even when this clearly represents the United State's largest bilateral programme in Africa, it is still fairly low on per capital basis. "This is because of Nigeria's size. When you consider that there are over 135 million Nigerians our assistance is not going to reach every person," she said.
On whether the development agency was considering raising the budget for Nigeria, she said: "We would like to be able to raise the budget, but of course that depends on the US congress not us. Still, we have been able to make a difference in immunization.
"From recent surveys, we know that the national immunization rate is about 12.9 percent, which is very low, but in project areas where we have been able to work in concert with the local government, state and federal governments, we have been able to increase the rate dramatically. Our latest data in September shows that in the local government areas that we have been working in, immunization rate is 69 percent versus the national rate of 12.9 percent, so you could see the difference. Other examples abound".
Giving a glimpse into how the agency operates without the misappropriation of funds by its local partners, Liberi said: "As at now, we work with close to 500 local Nigerian organisations. We have direct sub-grant relationships. So when USAID gives money to a partner, that partner in turn gives sub-grants to Nigerian organisations working in each of the six geo political zones, 12 states and Abuja covering 50 million people in all.
"We have a very strict system of accounting and accountability, performance monitoring and evaluation to make sure that the money is being spent how it was meant to be spent, that the people who are supposed to benefit from it do benefit and that we evaluate and measure it and report back to congress. We have a very rigorous system of feed back, monitoring, evaluation, performance and measurement. We also have underground presence and that is what separates us from other donor agencies and we are doing more to have more critical mass on board"
The USAID director also spoke on the agency's collaborative effort that led to the setting up of a judicial code of conduct for Nigerian judges, noting that it was its contribution towards ensuring a corruption free bench for the country in a bid to foster good governance and democracy.
|
|
||||||||||||
