 We're privileged to have with us, at this special expanded meeting of the National Economic Council, some of Nigeria's most committed and valued philanthropic and development partners. Some of them, of course, as you know, are not Nigerians, but have become somewhat Nigerian by association. Mr Bill Gates has been one of them. Here, of course, as you've heard, represents the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and, of course, Alaji Aliko Dangote and the Dangote Foundation. On behalf of the government and people of Nigeria, I thank you for being here with us today, and especially for the game-changing work that you have done here in Nigeria, by uniquely deploying huge resources and innovation through social enterprise to solving some of the most challenging issues of development that we face today. Bill, your special interest in Nigeria and your attention to a lot of the development concerns that we have, you've been all over the country. You've seen, as you've said yourself, so much of what has been done and what remains to be done. And at various times, you have intervened in various ways and made huge investments. I think that the encouragement that you gave consistently entitles you to speak to us, frankly, as you've done today, as a brother, and I must say that we are engaged fully as a government in particular and as governments in the various states to ensure that we are able to address some of these concerns. Let me reiterate that not only are we painfully aware of the issues that you have outlined and many that have already been spoken of, including what the Honorable Minister of Health also mentioned, but we are prepared to take on those challenges head on and indeed, we have no choice because the problem literally grows every day. Our population happens to be the largest in Africa and one of the largest in the world and in the next two decades, we will be some say the fourth, some say the third most popular country in the world. But Nigeria has strong economic growth and development ambitions encapsulated in our economic recovery and growth plan, which we launched in 2017. All of those lofty ambitions can only be achieved through the determined application of human skill and effort and for that effort to be meaningful and productive, it has to come from people who are healthy, educated and who are and feel empowered. It is this realisation that has helped us to ensure that one of the primary planks of our economic recovery and growth plan is, quote, investing in people and I think you pointed that out also in the comments that you made. And it is for this reason that we are expanding the reach and quality of our healthcare through the national healthcare insurance scheme and working to guarantee basic education for all persons whilst also upgrading and modernising the quality of secondary and post-secondary education. And because of the nature of the times we are in, we know that it's important to ensure that our young people are prepared for the economies of the future. This means that STEM education is critical, science, technology, engineering and maths and that technology must lie at the heart of everyone of our educational offerings and I'll be talking about this very briefly as we go along. In 2016, we launched a social investment programme comprising a job scheme for unemployed graduates, a feeding programme for public primary schools and a microcredit scheme for small businesses, a cash transfer scheme for our poorest and most vulnerable households. We started with a million. This social investment programme which is a key component of our economic recovery and growth plan is possibly the most ambitious in Nigeria's history. It aims to ensure ultimately that no one is left behind and that Nigeria's wealth is more equitably distributed to its vulnerable populations, the young and old, male and female, regardless of where in the country they live or what language they speak. Let me say a bit more about the school feeding programme because it's important that it addresses especially the issue of stunting. Now the school feeding programme is of course aimed at achieving better health, nutritional and educational outcomes for Nigerian children and we're working closely with the partnership for child development with the PCD, a research body that's based in the Imperial College London with a track record of supporting interventions that translate into healthier and better educated children. The school feeding programme currently serves over 7 million school children across 22 states of Nigeria and continues to grow as more states sign up for it. One of the important health outcomes of course is that it is meant to address malnutrition and stunting. When you're able to feed, give children, one good meal a day in school there is and for us this is this is a balanced meal because we're also concerned about the about the diet and about the components of that particular meal and so it's important you know as part of the efforts that we make that we look at what the content of that food is also and that you know helps us to address the major concerns on nutrition and stunting. There are of course also important educational and economic benefits to the school feeding programme. By guaranteeing a hot meal a day for these children the scheme has pushed school enrollment rates upwards in many of the communities in which it's been implemented. In fact in several of the communities we've seen over 30 percent increase in enrollment just because the children are being fed in school. It's also helped to boost the local economies by ensuring that the food served to the children is sourced from local farmers who tend to be small holder farmers and prepared and of course the food is prepared by local cooks. In many cases these farmers and cooks are the parents and guardians of the school children and so we are seeing what we're seeing is that the programme is bringing whole-scale benefit to low-income households. The programme the SIP also has a strong monitoring and evaluation component that tracks not only the quality of the food that is being served but also ensures that the intended outcomes are being delivered. Our cash transfer programme which we're delivering with the support of the World Bank makes it imperative for beneficiaries to fulfill certain conditions related to health and education before they can receive their monthly stipends. These conditions range from mandatory antenatal care for pregnant women to mandatory immunizations for nursing mothers to minimum school attendance rates for parents of school-aged children. So there is a connection between the social investment programme and the health outcomes we expect, the educational outcomes we expect and as we hone our programmes and as we hone the way in which we're delivering these programmes and as we ramp up the numbers we expect that these will have a tremendous impact on the overall health outcomes and overall educational outcomes. NPA is also one of the programmes in the SIP. This is the jobs for graduate component of the social investment programme and we deploy young Nigerians to work as health and teaching assistants bringing healthcare and education to more people across the country. Already we have 200,000 young Nigerians who are engaged and this year we intend to scale up by another 300,000 so we have 500 young Nigerians who are engaged as teaching assistants, who are engaged as healthcare assistants and some of them who are who work in farms who are engaged as who are engaged in farms and farm settlements advising farmers. A lot of those have already been trained, we've trained about 20,000 so far and we intend to ramp that up as we go along but more importantly we're leveraging on the creativity and innovation of our young people. Last year my office in collaboration with the ICRC launched the Northeast Make-A-Thon which is an exciting and creative hands-on co-creation programme initiated to crowd source and support brilliant and innovative ideas that can develop to scalable solutions to tackle in particular humanitarian challenges those faced especially in the IDP camps and other affected persons especially in the northeast of Nigeria. Since the launch of that programme we've had over 1,500 ideas which we sourced from all over Nigeria and we've identified six areas of the challenges these are education, health, protection of the camps and management, early recovery and economic security and in some cases food security and nutrition. The participants came from all over the country and these are all young people who are proposing interesting ideas and solutions to health, education and any of these solutions can be scaled up and can work in any region of the country. I'll just give a few of the examples of some of the really innovative ideas that we've managed to get from these young people. There's a young man called Kamal Sabili who invented something that he describes as a live box solution server a live box solution server. Now this is a cost-effective online tool that enables students to browse over 20 million educational contents within the education sector from primary to tertiary education levels. Live Box is free from bandwidth subscription and offers wireless access to digital knowledge from a local area network. So this is a simple invention that this young man has put together and it enables access to such a wide variety of educational information and it's offline so there's no need for the kind of bandwidth constraints that will frequently help. There's another, there's a gentleman from Abuja, a young man from Abuja called Abdul Aziz Afiz who invented what he described as Macaranta. Now Macaranta is an offline tool and is a mobile application solely designed to transition the unschooled and the school dropout back into the formal schooling system. Now Macaranta NG as it describes it captures a strategy used already by not-for-profit companies for over five years which focuses on building the capacity of teachers to use child specific lessons to prepare children who have been out of school from slum communities to transition into formal education. The focus is to create a learning space which enables competent teachers who have a bank of quality content to enhance the literacy, the numeracy and digital life and life skills of the target groups even in the most unconventional classrooms. So with this approach each child in the IDP is treated as a unique learner who can learn at their own pace and are prepared to be enrolled into the appropriate classes as they go along. So this is a very specific, a very specific innovation which we believe will be extremely helpful especially as we scale it up for using the IDPs and for using slum communities and especially designed to ensure that out-of-school children can get back into this into the system. And you know because it's child specific because it's specific to the needs of individual children it really does help to enable a child to learn without the constraint or peer pressure. There's another innovation this was designed by Zena Lawan, a lady who was a particularly innovative, a particularly inspiring candidate. She came from Maiduguri to pitch her idea in Abuja and her idea was a sanitary device which she had but on arriving at Abuja the night before the event she got a phone call that her father had died in Maiduguri. So she went all the way back to Maiduguri to be with her family but by the very next day she was back to just to ensure that she was able to pitch for that event and so for so many of us it was an extremely inspiring and extremely inspiring thing and this just shows you the the the energy and the tenacity of a lot of the young people that we have and this was in particular a young lady who as I've said came all the way from Maiduguri. Now what she pitched was what she called a Zdall dignity kit. The dignity kit is an affordable sanitary kit designed to assist young girls and women in proper hygiene during their menstrual cycles and at delivery. So when so she designed this this particular kit to take care of young women beg your pardon and the emphasis on dignity is particularly important because these are this was designed for very poor young women who at delivery or during their menstrual cycles need to be able to pay attention to standards of hygiene. Her invention was immediately picked up by the international development partners at the event. CARE and ICRC have already taken up that invention. The last the last of those innovations that I will mention is one that was made by a group called Snapshield. There's a group of young men and women and this is an organic water filtration system. The Snapshield team as they call themselves invented something that guarantees clean and drinkable water using a filtration system that uses soya bean chaff to filter water and making it suitable for drinking and other household uses. So they use soya bean chaff which is of course available locally everywhere. And I've emphasized some of the innovation that we're seeing with these young people because because we know that going forward we cannot rely just on any informal systems and you know the formal ways of solving these problems. We literally have to unleash the creativity and innovation of our young people to address the very huge problems that we are confronting and we will confront in the years to come. In agriculture a number of innovations have been introduced in the last three years and we've seen crop yields rise as much as threefold to fourfold bringing greater prosperity to small holder farmers. Our rice revolution is a developing story which we believe is worth paying attention to in terms of the transformative effect that is having unrual economies across the country. When President Mohammed Buhari took off his almost three years ago, uppermost in our minds as a government was how to ensure that our policies and programs were focused on improving the well-being of the people of this country. You might recall that previous years of high oil prices and economic growth had failed to translate to a better life for most Nigerians and of course you know we've had the emphasis we've talked about why, in many cases, grand corruption, waste and leakages, preventing investments in health care and education and infrastructure and from profiting any of these areas of our lives. But I think that the most important focus for us now is that we are completely determined to ensure that we make the kind of progress that will rewrite the story of our country to put Nigeria's money to work for Nigerians doing the most with the least that we earn and we have stayed true to that vision even as all prices went into threefold we've ramped up investments in infrastructure as well as our social spending. We're aggressively expanding government revenues by plugging leakages and widening the tax net to ensure that government is able to invest more in the things that matter. But I want to just emphasize that especially with respect to spending on education and spending on health care there's so many various areas in which spending is going on and I was speaking to the Minister of Finance about doing a desk review just so that we can dimension the exact how much exactly is being spent. There's a lot of private there's a lot of private intervention there's a lot of intervention at the level of government local governments in education for instance we have TED fund we have Ubeck we have several different we have several different places where money is being spent. I think it's important for us to dimension what exactly it is that we are spending on education and health care so that we're able to spend smarter because in some cases you find overlaps and in some cases you find that there is nothing going there whatsoever. So I think that the first thing and the Minister of Finance has said that this is something that you'll be willing to do is to dimension that exact quantum of the spending and also the areas where this is being spent who is spending and how we can spend most money and then look at how to ramp up the spending in a manner that takes into account what has been spent already. Most importantly also we're creating an enabling environment for the private sector to try succeeding at this means unleashing many more of the Alicorda motives with all that represents world economy jobs, more jobs, countless opportunities, all the kind of world changing philanthropy that both Alicorda and Alicorda have come to the point. We have not mentioned that there is a lot of work ahead of us our education health projects at all levels of development are nowhere they are optional levels but I cannot show you that we possess the political will and vision to make the needed investments for today and for tomorrow and that we are on the path of progress it's also clear that we cannot and must not attempt to do it alone that's why we are immensely grateful for the generous partnership from the Hill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as the numerous development partners who are here we just heard from the beginning of DFID and the former scratchers of the World Bank and so many of our development partners who have stood through to talk with us and ensured that we're able to deliver the human development course that we're set for ourselves. We'll continue to welcome your support and also hope that you will inspire all of our partners to follow your footsteps we'll do everything in our power to ensure that you have the right environment for your transformation of work and we trust that we can continue to counter from what is happening and partners well into the future. I thank you all very much for your support.