By Kolawole Ojebisi
Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, Prof. Nentawe Goshwe Yilwatda, has revealed how Artificial Intelligence was used by the Federal Government to ascertain rural dwellers languishing in abject poverty and in desperate need of handouts for survival.
Yilwatda spoke during a brief interview with Arise News on Saturday morning.
According to him over 5.8 million Nigerians have benefited from the FG Conditional Cash Transfer, (CCT) within six months of President Bola Tinubu’s directive that the money be transferred to only verified accounts.
He maintained that 18% of the people who received the N75,000 have started businesses of their own, dismissing the widespread claims that such amount is a pittance, too insubstantial to start a business.
“I’m from a rural community. If you meet a rural farmer and give him N75 thousand, because we also did also a research by the World Bank, we discovered that up to 18% of the people who received this amount were able to start a business of their own.
“Within six months, under President Tinubu’s directives that we should use only verified account numbers to make transfers to people, we have reached roughly 5.8 million households, totaling nearly 29 million people who have benefited from this payment.
“AI was used to generate the list of people who are poor within the community using their varied telephone numbers, and AI was also used to generate an additional 6.5 million who are urban poor, which was then added to the social register,” he said.
Yilwatda stressed that government has updated the social register for both the urban and rural poor, which now stands at 19.7 million.
