 Members of the International Advisory Board of the African Study Center, distinguished friends and colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, first let me say how deeply honored I am by this invitation to the African Study Center for this lecture. I must say that for me this is very coming to a university, it's a picnic, it's really wonderful, it's incredible. After mixing with politicians of every kind, you know, this is one of the most civilized gatherings that I've had the pleasure to address in a while, so really I'm very, the other good thing of course, the other good thing of course about the university is that you, no matter what nonsense you say, you'll find at least someone who will agree with you, so I really am extremely pleased to be here and very deeply honored to be here and to have been invited to speak today. Although clearly, you know, the Oxford study of Africa is decades ahead of the 2004 establishment of the center, it is commendable indeed that the Africa Study Center has in a few short years become one of the world's leading centers of African studies. What this center's role is, especially in the shaping of policy and ideas, is bound to become even more crucial as Africa enters possibly its most decisive two decades. This is because it is evident that there are at least four important respects that Africa will hold the balance of world development in the next two decades. The first is in world population, demography. The second is environment and climate change. The third is in production, especially agriculture, manufacturing and technology. And the fourth is in social exclusion, under which rubric comes poverty and human capital development and its implications for global security. Africa's failure or success on these issues will profoundly impact the fortunes of mankind. And I don't think that that overstakes the point at all. But as interlocutors in this imminent dispensation, your work is certainly cut out for you. This afternoon I'll be speaking for a few minutes on a sub-theme on one of these defining issues, the challenges of human capital development in the 21st century in 21st century Africa. But as you might guess, I will in the course of the lecture draw mainly from the Nigerian experience. As a political functionary of one of Africa's 54 states, I'm never quite certain of the diplomatic implications of really not bad statistics about other states. I'm never quite sure how that would be taken. But for my country, it isn't such a problem. I know what the opposition will say. I mean, they'll say stuff like, yes, the vice president admits that the government has messed up, you know, or at last the truth is out, something like that. So at least we can handle that. We deal with that every day. But seriously though, Nigeria accounts for 20% of Africa's population and its performance weighs quite heavily on continental indices. Nigeria is already beginning to show up in global discourse, sometimes as having the highest number of people in absolute poverty, although there are disputes here and there about that. It's progress therefore matters because by current projections, Nigeria will be the third most populous country in the world in 2014 with up to 400 million people. This is in just 22 years. Of course, if we get it right and we must, such a population could herald a demographic dividend. The alternative scenario, of course, is a perfect storm of population pressures on natural resources, the socioeconomic consequences of a huge jobless youth population, and climate change induced environmental damage. To get some clarity about the concept of human capital development, it's perhaps useful to note that it is sometimes described from the prism of absolute values. But I think it's more popular iteration today is as a relative measure of achievements in human progress. So considerable effort has already gone into developing parameters for its measurement. And I'm sure we're very familiar with several of these parameters, the Human Development Index, or HDI of the UNDP, which assesses progress in health, knowledge, and income per capita. The HDI has itself spawned many refinements and derivatives, including the Multidimensional Poverty Index developed here at Oxford by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative. And of course, this measures a plethora of indices, which relate generally to the impact of individuals and communities at their household level, such as lack of access to toilets, water, electricity, cooking fuels, and such like. Then we have the Gender Inequality Index, you know, which evaluates the percentage of potential development that is lost due to gender inequality across various dimensions, including reproductive health, economic participation, and political leadership. The World Bank Human Capital Index, which will be released sometime today, focuses on child survival, education, and health. As you probably know, there is considerable overlap in these indexes. And this is not surprising, given that they share a common provenance with the capabilities approach of Amartya Sen. Here's the one who, I'm sure we all know, developed this very idea, this idea that places emphasis on the capability or freedom of individuals to live the kind of lives they value, rather than on the availability of resources to live a good life. In other words, understanding what sorts of deprivation prevent the ability to live a good life is a better metric, according to him, for human capital development than focusing merely on income per capita. The various indexes are useful. They're useful snapshots of the issues that matter in ensuring that human capital contributes to future growth. And they make at least three important points. The first is that human capital development is inextricably linked to multi-dimensional poverty. Not surprisingly, the countries that perform worst in the measurements of human capital also have to contend with poverty. According to the World Bank, human capital explains up to 30% of the differences in per capita between countries. Another insight to be gleaned from the various indexes is that Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, is lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of human capital development. The highest ranked African country in the Human Development Index is number 63 in the world. The scale of poverty in Africa is huge by any of the measures that we use. While the proportion of poor Africans living below the current levels of absolute poverty of less than $1.90, you know, $1.9, has reduced from 56% to 40% more recently, the absolute numbers may actually have increased from about 280 million to over 400 million people today. Of course, this is on account of the, you know, the huge population, the growth rates that have gone up everywhere. Human capital development in Nigeria and Congo and Ethiopia, three of the larger countries in Africa by population size, is also unsatisfactory. Despite recent improvements, Nigeria is ranked 157 out of 189 countries in the world in the UNDP Human Development Index while Congo was ranked 176 and Ethiopia 173. In terms of, and these of course are the three largest countries in terms of population. In terms of education, two in five Africans are illiterate and despite increases in enrollment, there are still huge gaps in the quality of education. Nigeria has about 9 million out of school children of primary school age, which is said to be one of the highest in the world. Of those in school, only 20% have actually completed public primary education, who actually completed public primary education, were found to be able to read and were looking at statistics about five years back. The picture is not much different for health outcomes although substantial progress has been made in some areas such as tackling malaria and eradicating polio. Nigeria is one year away from being certified polio-free however there's still a lot more, there's still a lot more to be done. Malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia which are treatable account for 74% of under five mortality in Nigeria and which if things do not change is projected to have the most under five deaths in the world by 2021. The picture of under five malnutrition and stunting is also quite dire. A desegregation of the indexes at regional and national level also reveals huge disparities in regional and sub-national performance. While no African country is in the very high category at the global level, five countries are considered to have a high human development index, 13 of them are in the medium category while 32 populate the lower categories of the index. These disparities are not much different at the sub-national level in Nigeria, for example. While the proportion of children out of school in the total population of the state, for example in Lagos, it's just 1.83. So Lagos has 1.83, the percentage of 1.83% out of school. Gombe in the northeast, that's another state of Nigeria in the northeast has 24.12%. In Anambra State, a state in the southeast, the proportion of children of school age out of school is 6.22. While in Bauchi State, in the north, it is 55.59%. Now these disparities also reflect to some extent the attention that the states pay to these issues. The attention that individual states pay to these issues, especially as primary and secondary education are really sub-national matters. Also useful as all these metrics are to show the scale of the challenge, they can neither by themselves convey the reality of the misery of poverty, nor can they reflect the psychological burden of poverty or the reality of poverty as exclusion, which is so poignantly put by Mother Theresa who said, and I quote, being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody. I think that's a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat, end of quote. This loss of dignity and disempowerment is in many ways the face of poverty anywhere in the world and consequently of poor human capital development. So what are the key factors responsible for poor human capital development in Africa? And I'm sure as I go through them, you'll see that some of them sound like consequences as well as causes. So these include poverty, unemployment, conflicts, climate change and environment, poor policy choices, corruption, and the phenomenon of illicit financial flows and underinvestment in human capital development. So the causes that I've said, such as poverty for example, are at once a cause as well as a consequence of poor human capital development. The poor are of course unable to procure their basic needs in education, in healthcare and living standards. Destitute families do not have the wherewithal or savings to invest in their children's education and healthcare is either not available or is simply too expensive. In Nigeria for instance, 72% of healthcare is paid out of individual pockets, which means that the poor and destitute find it difficult to access even basic health services. Unemployment rates are high on the continent, simply because the number of new entrants to the job market far outstrip the pace of job creation. Even for the employed, decent incomes of course are required if we're to make any sort of dent on poverty or on human capital development. Conflict is also of course a source of poor human capital formation. Paul Collier, I'm sure as a familiar name around here has estimated for instance that typically a seven year civil war will reduce GDP by 15% over that period and many of the civil conflicts in Africa tend to just last about that long. So that's roughly about 2% drop in GDP every year. Certainly there is some merit in many of these arguments. The northeast of Nigeria which has been an arena of a brutal terrorist campaign by Boko Haram and lately ISIS West Africa and has seen an attendant decline in farming and all the commercial activity. The rise in malnutrition, disruption of education and of course the consequence is low levels of human capital development. Although as I'll point out later, Borno State really offers some interesting dimensions, especially in more recent times or we'll come to that in a moment. The environment and climate change is increasingly becoming also one of the most prominent inhibitors of human capital development in Africa, especially with the rise in extreme weather events such as flash floods, desertification, drought and on seasonal occurrences and several other events, several other events that have created problems for those who farm and for different forms of livelihoods. Recently we've had in Nigeria, terrible flooding in about nine states. Several farmlands have been destroyed on account of this and of course several homes have been under water and of course these are largely on account of climate change. Lake Chad, Africa's fourth largest lake which is surrounded by Nigeria, by Niger, Chad and Cameroon in 1960 covered 25,000 square kilometers in 1960. Today it has shrunk to less than 1,350 square kilometers. So the water that it provided for irrigation, for fishing, for livestock, for millions is now practically non-existent and of course the implications for those who live in that neighborhood and of course those who work, those who farm and those who rare cattle. Poor policy choices including structural adjustment programs must also take some of the responsibility for poor human capital development outcomes in Africa. At the height of the structural adjustment programs in Africa, UNICEF commissioned a path breaking study called adjustments with a human face. Essentially that study highlighted the negative impact that structural adjustment policies were having on education, on health and child welfare and they call for more attention to be paid to human development and poverty in the design of adjustment programs. Economic policies in nations with large numbers of the poor must prioritize that sort of reality or closely linked to the issue of poor choices is a problem of illicit financial flows from Africa and of course this is all related to the general question of corruption. According to the in Becky high level panel on illicit financial flows comprising tax evasion, money laundering and abuse of public trust. That report says that these various problems are responsible for a minimum outflow of $80 billion from Africa. The panel found that illicit financial flows had a direct effect on the provision of school clinics, sanitation, security, water and social protection. It cited a study showing that illicit financial flows impacted negatively on achieving the infant mortality targets of the millennium development goals. It found that without illicit financial flows the Central African Republic for example would achieve its MDG targets in four categories in 45 years instead of 218 years at the current rate of progress. Equally striking was Mauritania where the same targets will be achieved in 19 years instead of 198 years and the Republic of Congo in 10 years rather than 120 years. More interesting of course was the finding that if illicit financial flows had been arrested by the turn of the century, Africa would have met its four targets, MDG's four targets, all of them by 2016 if illicit financial flows had been arrested. Now the question of course is that very frequently we're unable to understand all our publics are unable to understand the impact of corruption on living standards, the impact of corruption on human capital development and all of that because we don't make these sorts of connections. We don't, people don't understand those connections. For example, I was saying that there was a fraudulent contract, a fraudulent oil contract in Nigeria that cost us $3 billion. $3 billion was stolen on account of this fraudulent contract about three, four years ago. Now with one billion of that amount of money, just that $1 billion would have accounted for our education and health budgets, current education and health budgets, just $1 billion. Can you imagine what $3 billion would have done? Now those connections sometimes are difficult for people to understand unless they are made, unless they are made repeatedly because people even sometimes say to you that, well, because many, especially in Africa, where very few people actually pay taxes. Of course, as you can imagine Nigeria, for example, we have a tax to GDP of about 6%. So tax for electronics is low, although that has gone up considerably. Now when people don't pay taxes, it's very difficult to understand when you say somebody has stolen money. If you say, well, this fellow stole a large sum of money, if you don't pay taxes, it's very difficult for you to quickly see the link between how this affects you. But in places where taxes are paid and those who pay taxes, it's easy to say that the fellow has stolen taxpayer's money. And so it just has that greater resonance. And I think that it's important, to explain sometimes why people sometimes get away with even just simply given any kind of explanation for stealing public resources. And the way that accountability sometimes is slow, the way that the law is sometimes slow in catching up with those individuals. Underinvestment is without a doubt a contributory factor to low human capital development in Africa in circumstances in which the poor are unable to invest in their human capital needs, the owners may fall on governments to do so. However, this has historically been difficult because of resource constraints. Apart from losses due to leakages, government revenue may be constrained by low economic base, poor tax administration and existing indebtedness. In the case of Nigeria, underinvestment reflects a historical failure to give required priority to spending on human capital requirements. Until recently, Nigeria did not have a program dedicated to social protection on a large scale, such that despite having the highest poverty rates amongst lower middle income countries, it spent only 0.3% of GDP on social protection as of 2014 and early 2015. Prior to recent interventions, public health spending as a proportion of GDP was also said to be one of the lowest. The federal government's capital allocation to the health sector was increased from 22.7 billion Naira in 2015 to 86.5 billion Naira this year, while their location to education increased fourfold from 23.5 billion in 2015 to 102 billion in 2018. The interesting and uncomfortable fact that a lot of our political opponents don't want to hear is that despite earning 60% less, we're doing four, five times more in terms of investment in human capital development. Thank you very much. Thank you. You guys are obviously not the opposition, so I understand this. So let us look very quickly at government's role in providing human capital. Clearly, improving human capital development must be a priority of public policy. Indeed, given the scale and extent of multi-dimensional poverty in Africa, governments have a moral obligation, a duty to put human capital development at the very top of their concerns. The moral case is clear and it is also in our collective interest to do so. Poverty, illiteracy, destitution, and a lack of jobs and economic opportunity often feed into feelings of marginalization and dislocation. These in turn manifest in social tensions, in communal conflict, and sometimes over conflicts over scarce resources as a result of population pressures and environmental degradation. In its multi-dimensional form, poverty also implies a deficit in the human capital that underpins long-term development. As policymakers, our very first instinct in tackling poverty is to bake a larger pie by boosting growth so that there is more to go around. However, in the face of high inequality, rapid growth by itself cannot translate to reduced poverty. Rapid growth by itself cannot. Indeed, we have seen in Nigeria that at a time of growth in the order of six to seven percent unemployment increased. The phenomenon, as we're told, of jobless growth. Botswana is consistently cited as a country with appreciable growth over the long term, but the inequality also is significant. Perhaps the best way we can say in the circumstances is that there is some nexus between growth and human capital development that leads to desired reductions in poverty. Perhaps through expanded opportunities and the skills and health to hold down jobs. But clearly, this simply cannot match the scale and speed of interventions that are required to improve health and educational outcomes in Africa. Now, this is the rationale for the provision in Nigeria's economic recovery and growth plan for a pillar which we describe as investing in our people. And again, this pillar was particularly important and I will talk just a little bit about how we have taken this into actual policy and how we've implemented it. We'll come down to that also in a moment. But it is government that has the powers of taxation to raise the resources for wide provision of basic social needs. Government also is best placed to deploy the public policy tools required to bring about synergy between growth objectives and social needs. Most notable in this regard will be the striking a balance between expenditure items in the public budget, especially capital expenditure that will boost growth in the long run and the direct provision of resources to tackle poverty. The trade off is not always an easy one to make, especially when resources are scarce. One of the very frequent arguments that we have at budget meetings and economic management meetings is really this whole question of how much should you put to social protection? How much should you put to social investments? It's almost a sense that social investment is the sort of thing that you, it's almost like arms giving, you know. So you really almost need to be convinced about it almost on a spiritual level to be able to get people to be able to get people to understand how important this is in terms of economic policy. And these arguments continue. But I think that it is becoming more important and it's becoming more, and I think people are beginning to accept more that this, especially for poor countries, especially for countries where you have large numbers of poor people, that this should be the beginning of economic planning. It should be the priority in terms of economic planning. When times are hard, you know, of course some people see interventions to mitigate the effects of poverty as pandering to people who are not working, while others are struggling to make ends meet. You know, I mean, for instance, we had some arguments recently. We got funds which were returned from what is described as the abacha loot, about $320 million was returned to Nigeria from where it was stuck after the attempt to steal it. It got stuck in Switzerland and was returned to us. Now we decided along with, no, no, we did not decide the court, the Swiss court, actually said that it was only going to be released on the condition that it was applied to some social cause with the supervision of the World Bank. Of course, we argued back and forth, you know, all of that, but eventually we agreed and so, you know, but when we then decided to apply it to our conditional cash transfer scheme, there were several people who argued that why are you giving all this money away, you know? And why don't you go and build infrastructure or do something with it? So we're always going to have those tensions whenever you're putting money aside for social development or social investments, there will always be those arguments about whether or not this isn't just a waste of money. Well, we've seen that aside from governments, non-governmental organizations and philanthropic organizations also helped to bridge the funding gaps. In Nigeria, for example, significantly, the Dangote Foundation with its partner, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have worked closely with governments and international partners to scale up interventions in healthcare. Similarly, the Illumilu Foundation has become well-known for its interventions in providing entrepreneurship training, not just in Nigeria, but across Africa. We found in Nigeria that with a strong will on the part of governments, and I take again the example of the Bono State government in Northeast Nigeria, and its willingness to partner non-governmental organizations, they were able to contribute, you know, noteworthy educational outcomes. So despite the brutal insurgency and terrorism of Boko Haram, Bono was able to maintain relatively low levels of out-of-school children as a share of local population. The percentage was 6.39%, which was much higher than the levels in the South, and one quarter of the level in the neighboring states, in neighboring Gumbay state, for example. So it is possible where there is very active participation of the state government, working with development agencies, and where there's political will, and I must say that Carduna State has also shown great political will and worked with many of the development agencies. As a matter of fact, some people ask why it is that all the development agencies spend all their time in Carduna State, but I suspect that it has to do with some of the killishies that they, killishies, killishies, by the way, is a local delicacy, you know. So let's just talk very quickly about some of the human capital development initiatives that we've tried to introduce in Nigeria. To promote growth, and I'll just go through this very quickly, to promote growth, we have accorded priority to macroeconomic stability and continued diversification of our economy from direct or indirect dependence on crude oil exports. Now, this is quite an important point because, you know, generally speaking, of course, you know that when oil prices rise, there is growth, you know. Now, I don't want to go into too much of the detail of that, but the truth of the matter is that rising oil prices or increased oil production does not of itself create jobs because the oil industry by itself creates very few jobs indeed. So there is a need to use the oil resources to diversify the economy. So those who say that we should no longer be dependent on oil are always faced with the argument that we need this oil so that we can diversify. So we need oil to get away from oil. So you'll see that, you know, so you'll see that, you know, where there are all these tensions. We've also prioritized spending on infrastructure, railroads, and power in particular, despite earning 60% less, as I said, than previous administration, we spent 2.7 trillion Naira in two budget cycles on capital, the highest in the nation's history. We've also executed a comprehensive phased plan for ease of doing business, which earned us 24 places higher in the World Bank Ease of Doing Business Index and commendation as one of the top 10 reforming economies in the world. Thank you very much. We're also particularly about reducing inflation, which eats, of course, into the limited purchasing power, especially of the poor, who do not have much of a choice in changing the basket of goods that they consume. However, a major premise of our economic model was the focus on empowering jobless youth and millions in extreme poverty by a mix of micro-credit schemes, welfare for the most vulnerable, and direct creation of jobs. So we adopted a policy of support for rural farmers by the provision of direct credit to farmers at below market rates, in what we described as an anchor borrower's program. Now, that program is planned to create a linkage between large anchor companies, large anchor and culture companies, and smallholder farmers of specified commodities. The idea is to provide subsidized credit to smallholder farmers so that they can boost production with guaranteed uptake by the anchor companies. So far, we spent in total about 55 billion naira, and we've disbursed this to close to 300,000 farmers, and another 250,000 farmers are waiting for their own disbossments. So this direct credit to farmers, this direct credit to farmers who already have off-takers, is one that we've found to work very, very well indeed, especially with rice production. We were importing $5 million of rice every day in Nigeria up until the end of 2016, and we're no longer importing that, we're down to 2% of imports, all the rice we consume now is just 2% of imports, and we're now producing about 17 million metric tons of paddy rice. We have issues, of course, with milling. We have issues, of course, with milling, milling that rice, but we think that we will be completely self-sufficient in rice production, in tomato production, and several others. Of course, there is arable land, there is, the resources are there, and there's absolutely no reason why we should be importing food in the way that we had been importing food. But it always takes a downturn in all prices, it always takes some hardship for us to realize that we can do all of these things ourselves. We also launched an energizing economies project, which is basically providing renewable energy, solar power in particular, to markets and economic clusters for small businesses and traders. So the whole idea of this is that we're providing power directly in markets, and we're using solar power in particular in several markets across the country for those who know the country well. Araria market in Aba is one of the largest markets that we have in the country, and we've put solar in Araria markets, so we've done about 31,000 shops in all. Sub-Hungary market in Kano, we've done over 13,000 shops. Surah market in Lagos, for those who know the place, 1047. In general, we've done about over 81,000 shops, servicing about 320,000 MSMEs. Now the idea, of course, is that for those who are familiar with the power problems that we have in Nigeria, we decided that we needed to power economic clusters, especially where you have small businesses, because small businesses really are the life and soul of the economy. And so we decided that it would make more sense to actually take the power to those economic clusters where people were doing their business or what different businesses and different economic activities. And we've really seen a tremendous improvement in the output of those individuals. For one thing, they're able to stay longer for those who want to work later into the evenings, they're able to work later into the evenings, they're able to refrigerate their products, those who sell livestock and sell beef and various things are able to refrigerate as well. But perhaps the most far-reaching policy that we have implemented is a social investment program. In 2016, we budgeted a sum of about 500 billion Naira, it's close to $1.5 billion, for a multi-dimensional social investment scheme. This is the largest provision for social investment in our nation's history. We made the same provision in the 2017 budget. Though we have so far only been able to fund that to about 250 billion in the two budget cycles. The program has six components. The first is a conditional cash transfer scheme under which 5,000 monthly, about $15, is given to the poorest and most vulnerable households in the country, on the condition that they participate in educational health and nutritional activities. So far, we've done about 300,000 households. The immediate target is a million. We think that we should be able to do 700,000 by the end of the year. But one of the most important things about this is that when you look at the sums of money that we're talking about, it really does sound like a little amount of money. But the truth is that what we found in all of the places, because these are really the poorest, is that they're able to use the money for many of their basic needs. And because it is regular, they're able to plan, they're able to invest in petty trading and small businesses and all that. And we think that one of the most important things to do is not just to keep the study and expand the net of it, but also to provide even more, even for more people. Because certainly a million, where you have close to 60 million persons, is barely scratching the surface. So we really need to look at how to improve and to increase the scope of the CCTs. As I had said earlier, the sum of money which was returned from the Abacha Loot, about 320 million, is going towards that same, the conditional cash transfers. And we think that this might help to improve the numbers of those who are giving the cash transfers. Government enterprise and empowerment program is also an important tool for financially empowering small businesses, artisans, market women, petty traders and tabletop traders. Two of the popular products of that scheme are called market money and trader money. Now the market money is a short term, is a short tenor interest free credit of between 50,000 and 300,000 Naira for small businesses under the auspices of their cooperative societies. Now that's a risk management device. So we give sums of between 50,000 and 300,000 Naira, the 300,000 Naira to small businesses, to traders and all of that. But we give it through their cooperative societies. Now the cooperative societies help pay a pressure to ensure that these sums are returned. We've had a very, very good rate of repayment, which has helped greatly in ensuring that it continues. Today we have almost, we have close to 500,000 small businesses that have accessed that loan. Now the trader money on the other hand is a micro credit loan for the bottom of the pyramid trader. Now that bottom of the pyramid trader is the last mile in the retail chain. As a petty trader, whose inventory is usually not even $15. And so his entire inventory is just about that. Now many of these traders who would describe as the last, really the last mile, are persons who form the largest army of traders in the country. But they've been completely ignored over the years because they are considered too risky for any kind of loan. Many of them are mobile, you know. So generally speaking, nobody wants to give them a loan. But we thought that it would be important to ensure that these individuals are able to get loans and we decided that we will do everything to ensure that we're able to keep a good record of who they are. We have the biometrics, photographs and all of that. And what we've seen even in a very short period is that because when you get the 10,000 Naira loan, if you pay back within a six month period, you get 15,000, if you pay back you get 20,000. We've seen even now that there's been a very, very interesting rate of return. People are actually paying back because obviously you can get more money when you pay back. And this has proved to be quite successful. So once you've been able to pay back and you get your 20,000, you can then graduate to what is called the market money, which is the 100,000, 50,000 to 300,000. Now, two million petty traders, we hope will be able to benefit from this micro credit scheme. And as you can imagine, it's very, very popular, very popular with the petty traders. The major plank of our approach to empowerment is to improve financial inclusion. Already under the market money scheme, 34,000, we now have 349,000 new bank accounts. And we hope that we will be able to open bank accounts for the other two million people as they get their credit. So we think that this is a very important tool also for financial inclusion. And we think that this will be helpful because it then gives us access to these traders, access to, of course, we can bring them properly into formal business. They may also, at some point, come into the tax net. That, of course, isn't a matter that you necessarily want to discuss very loudly. Our homegrown school feeding program is also yet another one of this social investment programs. Here we give a free balanced meal to over 9.2 million children in 26 states of the Federation so far in about 45,000 public primary schools. Now, the program has been operational now for close to two years. And there are several dimensions of it. The first is that because it's a homegrown school feeding program, the states have to use, in the states, they have to use local produce, livestock, and poultry. Of course, that supports local agriculture. It also provides jobs for about 95,440 cooks, resident, of course, in the various communities in which the schools are located. And the program is also designed to improve malnutrition outcomes. And it has improved school enrollment tremendously. I know that when the program took off in Kanduna State, I think they had almost 30% or so improvement in school enrollment. So it also brings, you know, of course, many, many, many young, many of these children to school. As a proportion of working age, the working age group of between 15 and 59 years continues to increase steadily over the years. Nigeria, of course, has the advantage of a demographic dividend. But harnessing that dividend through appropriate skill development efforts requires an opportunity for us to at least provide something, some way of training, some way of training these young men and women. Over the past two years, through what we call the N-Power program, we've been able to offer skills development programs digitally to over 500,000 young Nigerians, of course, between the ages of 18 and 35. We have set a target of scaling 10 million Nigerians by 2023. Now the N-Power program is a jobs program for young graduates, and it is the largest post-tissure employment program in Africa. 500,000 graduates have been recruited as teachers, agricultural extension workers, public health officials, and the process of engaging them has also been somewhat of an eye-opener for us in government. We use the web-based application that provides a level playing field for all applicants, no room for favoritism. You simply apply through this process, you take your tests online, and you are appointed online, and our contact is essentially online. Each of these volunteers is provided with an electronic tablet, with which they are trained to provide required services on an ongoing basis. So each of them has the first 200,000, the last 300,000 have only just come on board, but the first 200,000 already have their tablets. Each has a device that's just like this one. And that device empowers them to participate in the digital economy as data collectors and as an analyst. It is loaded with training material for various things from entrepreneurship, training to code writing, all manner of training material. NPA goes straight to the heart of social inclusion through direct job creation and providing these young people with skills for the modern economy. A core plank of our empowerment approach is a provision also of social housing in the Family Homes Fund, which is not too dissimilar to some of... I think one of the closest examples is a similar project in India. Our Family Homes Fund aims to provide up to 500,000 housing units by 2023, using a concessional financing facility to construct houses at less than 5 million, as well as a home loans assistance program that will enable people at the bottom of the housing pyramid to buy their own homes at subsidized rates. This will be complemented by a rent-to-own scheme. It's expected that this program will provide another 1.5 million jobs by 2023 in the building materials industry, in construction, and house maintenance, amongst other things. I'll be done in a moment. A vision... When you invite a professor to... I mean, I'm enjoying this. A vision for the future. Our expanded social investment and protection is the certain objective of the next few years. We intend to maintain and expand our existing programs in the social investment. We also envisage additional areas of intervention in collaboration with state governments who are indispensable partners, given our federal arrangements and constitutional division, especially on labour, on health and educational matters. One major program that we intend to undertake is a rural infrastructure program that will make it easier for agricultural products to get to market while providing jobs for rural dwellers. Of course, improved educational outcomes are crucial to our overall strategy to end extreme poverty, reduce inequality, and remain in the path of sustainable growth. While the arguments will rage as to just how crucial education is to ending extreme poverty, there's no question that illiteracy or lack of access to quality education is closely associated with poverty. UNESCO's Global Education Monitoring Report and the Education Commission's Learning Generation Report provide important evidence on the impact of education on the individual's earnings and economic growth. They found, for example, that education reduces poverty. Of course, as I said, there are arguments back and forth. Increases individual earnings. It reduces economic inequalities and promotes economic growth. By their estimates, 171 million people could be lifted out of extreme poverty if all children left school with basic reading skills. And that's equivalent to about a 12% drop in the world total. Absolute poverty, they also find, could be reduced by 30% from learning improvements as outlined by the Education Commission. So for us, we have a three-fold plan to improve educational outcomes. To start with, there will be greater focus on achieving the specified sustainable development goals such that we can meet the targets for school enrollment, quality of education, adult literacy, and quality of teaching by 2030. Secondly, we will undertake a program to get the 9 million out of school children into school. Now, this will be a fairly complex process, requiring the full cooperation of state governments, religious authorities, as well as the resources to build schools, equip them properly, and train the required number of teachers. But I think that one of the major issues for us also is how to use technology to train large numbers of people. We know that in the coming years, building classrooms will certainly not be the way to go. The numbers simply will require technology to teach, to train teachers, technology to educate. And we're certainly going to be looking at all of the innovative ways of teaching that may not necessarily involve the former brick-and-matter. Our school-feeding program is already leading, as I've said, to improved enrollment. And the MPR program can be a source of the initial requirement for teachers. Thirdly, it's evident that our rapidly increasing population and the, as I say, the fourth industrial revolution has changed the educational challenge before us quite radically. Given our limited resources and the current gaps in educational attainment, it is quite clear that we have to change both the substance of education that our children receive, as well as the methods by which they are educated. We have now identified early-stage investment in primary and secondary education as keys to achieving the economic aspirations of becoming a knowledge-driven economy. There's also a general agreement about the importance of STEAM education, as opposed to STEM, science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. And the need for a workforce with STEAM skills to drive economic prosperity, and the contribution that STEAM can make in solving the tough problems of the world. Now, this informs our policy in the introduction of science, technology, engineering, arts, and math curriculum in primary and secondary schools. We recognize that schooling should support the development of skills in cross-disciplinary, critical, and creative thinking, problem-solving, and digital technologies, which are essential in all of the 21st century occupations. Set against Nigeria's desire for strong and functional STEAM education is the fact that decades of neglect of basic schooling infrastructure and adequate teacher training must be matched by a focused investment in large-scale and innovative solutions that overlap current conditions. The federal government of Nigeria aims to introduce in-class skills, especially economic and interpersonal skills around science, technology, engineering, arts, and maths. A countrywide curriculum is in development with coding, digital arts, design thinking, robotics, critical thinking, and other skills taken into account in interpreting traditional curriculum topics. The curriculum is one of the crucial components of the program's success. It recognizes the importance of having a well-rounded curriculum that is global in orientation and local in its application. To this end, the curriculum content is sourced in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Oracle Academy, Microsoft, Cisco Academy, and IBM. There's also enthusiastic consensus around the inclusion of practical classes on climate change and the environment in the curricula from primary to secondary education. Erosion, desertification, flooding are some of the very real effects of climate change that continue to affect livelihood, especially for rural dwellers who largely depend on agriculture for subsistence. Some notion of disaster risk reduction from form part of our education reality. And we think that that is important, that we must be thinking of how to include some ideas of disaster risk reduction in our curriculum. Our focus on education for sustainable development in the school curriculum aims to promote the knowledge skills, attitudes, and values necessary to shape a sustainable future. The objective is for climate change education to aid the understanding and complexities and the interconnections of the various challenges posed by climate change. The introduction of climate change education will also promote learning about the causes and effects of climate change, as well as possible responses, providing a cross-curricular and multidisciplinary perspective. It should develop competencies in the field of climate change mitigation and adaptation with the aim of promoting climate resilient development and reduce the vulnerability of our communities. Besides understanding the links between consumption patterns and climate change, this will engender responsible actions and contribute to reduced greenhouse emissions through more sustainable lifestyles. For improved health outcomes in the health sector, we are similarly exploring options for radical reform by ensuring that health gets at least 8% share of any increase in government spending and by ensuring that the recently operationalized basic health care provision fund is used to substantially increase health financing. We're also improving, moving aggressively, to change the perverse relationship between primary and tertiary health care, which attracts almost the same level of funding to a 60% primary, 20% secondary, and 20% tertiary allocation of funds. Of course, we are committed to universal health insurance using co-payments in order to share the cost between individuals, the private sector, and the government, while the poorest 40% will be exempted from such co-payments. It's impossible, of course, to fund health care using budgets alone. And this is why, for us, universal health insurance is important, but the substantial portion of that will have to be paid, the substantial portion of the premiums will have to be paid by governments until such a time as living standards improve. So by this means, we hope to get a 45% increase in the share of the population, covered by primary health care by 2023, up from the present 12.6%. Keeping a similar level of ambition, we would have 98% coverage by 2028. By similar means, the total government expenditure on health should increase to 7.8% in 2023 as compared to the current level of 5.3%. This year alone, the Basic Health Care Provision Fund contributed an additional 55.15 billion to health financing. Improved health outcomes will also entail greater cooperation with the private sector, as greater demand arising from health insurance will cause more high-quality private hospitals to be built. Already, our National Sovereign Investment Authority has invested $10 million to build a world-class cancer treatment center in Lagos. So, in conclusion, and this is the final conclusion, going forward, it is clear that we will need more local granular and up-to-date statistics on human capacity development and poverty to be better equipped to develop and adapt and implement relevant policies. Data will also be essential in order to track and monitor the outcomes of our various interventions. Obviously, more resources will also be needed to substantially move beyond our current human capacity development situation. But perhaps more importantly, African governments must prioritize investments in people. It's also evident that the multi-dimensional nature of poverty requires multi-pronged responses. Interventions to increase growth and incomes alone are clearly incomplete and must be matched by interventions to tackle deprivation and destitution. A key lesson is that it is essential in tackling poverty to take long-term perspectives while providing short-term support to the needy and the most vulnerable. Welfare schemes should be empowerment-oriented, offering opportunity to work, especially in rural areas. There's no alternative to ensuring that credit gets to informal traders, the bottom of the pyramid in the trade chain. The challenges of human development in Africa are clearly enormous, but so are the opportunities to significantly move the needle to vastly improve standards of existence for our people. All over Africa, the political will to better the lot of our resty populations is evident. Innovative ideas are in abundance, and if we keep our focus, especially on good governance, the next two decades may truly be the African decades. Thank you very much. Thank you.