Group tasks FG on economic plans for women, youths

The Development Research and Projects Centre (DRPC) and other partners have asked the Federal Government to initiate a harmonised monitoring and evaluation mechanism that would ensure effective outcomes for economic projects and plans for women and youths in the country.

It stressed that such a coordinated monitoring and evaluation plan would ensure the effective implementation of projects targeting women and youths in the country’s budgets.

President of the Nigerian Association of Women Entrepreneurs (NAWE), Veronica Ndanusa, pointed out that a lot of budgetary provisions for women, youths and the less privileged, hardly get to the target groups due to poor tracking, monitoring and evaluation.

She stated this at a one-day technical working meeting on monitoring and evaluation of the government’s investment on Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE), organised by the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS) in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning.

It was supported by DRPC, Partnership for Advancing Women in Economic Development (PAWED) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in Abuja, at the weekend.

She argued that a harmonised mechanism would ensure seamless monitoring and evaluation of the government’s mid-term economic projects so that they get to those for which they were meant, especially women in the rural areas, who need to benefit from such interventions.

Ndanusa added that such initiative could only be achieved by validating Federal Government’s documents on monitoring and evaluation on a regular basis.