Fight Poverty From Villages,Yar'Adua Orders NAPEP

from All Africa

Vanguard (Lagos)

By Franklin Alli
Lagos

PRESIDENT Umaru Musa Yar' Adua has ordered National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP) to fight poverty from the villages in the 774 Local Governments across the nation.

The Presidency has also brought back Dr. Magnus Kpakol as the National Coordinator of the Agency.

Kpakol was former Economic Adviser and headed NAPEP as National Coordinator in the last administrations of President Olusegun Obasanjo.

Briefing newsmen on Wednesday in Lagos on the development, Kpakol while expressing profound gratitude to President Yar'Adua for his thoughtfulness, said " fighting poverty is a huge task. I've come back with passion, with my sleeves rolled up to bring down extreme poverty with the active participation of stakeholders- federal, states, local governments, private sector investors, etc."

"We want to consolidate the gains we recorded in the past administrations, and also to introduce fresh ideas for going forward," he said.

He said that in response to President Yar' Adua's challenges to fight poverty from grass roots, NAPEP has , therefore, initiated a new scheme called "Village Economic Development Solutions (VEDS)," to tackle poverty in country.

Noting that poverty rate has dropped from 54.4 per cent to 50 percent between 2004 to 2 007, Kpakol said the VEDS scheme is a local community driven development programme designed by the Economic Growth and Development Centre (EGDC) and adopted by NAPEP.

According to him, in the VEDS, local villages are guided in their community economic development efforts that involve modernizing their villages and promoting income generating activities.

"Today, many communities believe that government should be responsible for all development efforts in their communities. Through the VEDS, villages are encouraged to see community development and poverty eradication as a joint responsibility to which every member of the village is a stakeholder and can be an active participant," he noted.

A strong economy in terms of sound monetary and fiscal policy, moderate inflation, moderate budget deficit , moderate size of government, he said go along way to help the Agency to bring down the rate of poverty in the country.