By Ndey Sowe
Dr. Amat Bah, the Executive Director of the National Nutrition Agency (NaNA) who also doubles as the Social Safety Net Project (SSNP) Coordinator, disclosed that the World Bank has rated NaNA’s performance on the NaFA project as satisfactory.
“As a project coordinator, I think we are in safe hands, and I will just go back to the World Bank rating from the last mission we had as satisfactory, and this is a huge achievement,” Dr Bah affirmed.
Dr Bah was speaking on Tuesday 27th of December 2022, at the Child Fund Lodge Conference Hall in Bwiam, during the second convergence that brought together all stakeholders in the project, to take stock of what they have done over the past year, and to see whether there are ways to improve some of the processes, but most importantly, to evaluate the achievements that the project made.
“We have seen a lot of positives in terms of elevating the households that we have identified as extremely poor, in terms of their performance, and we have also seen what they have done with the monies they have received,” Dr. Bah explained.
He said most of the beneficiaries have invested in the education of their children, whilst some invested in small ruminants, businesses, poultry and gardening, among other interventions.
According to Dr. Bah, they had ten solid recommendations during their last convergence, and nine of these recommendations have been implemented alreay.
Yankoba Jabbie, the Director of Social Welfare explained their role in the project. He said there is a grievance redress mechanism where anyone who has complains can go to and get redress.
Fatou Dibba, the Director for the Department of Community Development said their role in the project’s activities is to help in the mobilisation of communities towards these activities as well as building capacity by educating beneficiaries on the project activities including cash transfer and others.
Momodou Dibba, the National Coordinator at the National Social Protection Secretariat assured that they are helpful in their interventions and are ready to work with all stakeholders towards the advancement of the project as they move toward its completion.
“We will follow up the activities from the last convergence and anything that relates to SSNP, we will work to ensure that they are achieved,” Mr Dibba said.
Malang N. Fofana, the facilitator of the SSNP said during project initiation, they wanted to meet 15,606 extremely poor households found in the twenty poorest districts of the country, based on the poverty study that was done by GBoS in 2016-2017; that as at now, they have about 16,996 households in the project and each household will be in the project for eighteen months, meaning they will have nine circles each of a cash transfer of D3,000 every two months.
“We have almost met about over one hundred and sixty thousand people who have benefited from this project as far as the cash transfer is concerned,” Mr Fofana disclosed.
