FCTA earmarks N1.8bn for Fadama CARES

The Federal Capital Territory Administration, (FCTA) has allocated the sum of $4.5 million (1,865,385,000.00) to the FCT COVID-19 Action Recovery and Economic Stimulus (FCT CARES) project for the implementation of three Disbursement Linked Indicators (DLIs) out of a total allocation of $15 million from the World Bank.

In a keynote address, the chairman, FCT Fadama CARES technical committee and secretary, Agriculture and Rural Development Secretariat, Abubakar Ibrahim, made the declaration yesterday at a sensitisation workshop on the Fadama CARES programme organised for top policy makers in the FCTA and the area councils.

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The FCT CARES programme is a World Bank budget support to the FCTA for non-discretionary expenditure targeted at supporting existing and newly emerging vulnerable and poor households, agricultural value chains and micro and small enterprises (MSEs) that have been negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The programme will employ a community-driven development approach to deploy investments at the community level.

He said it underlined the significance accorded agricultural development in the FCT and the need for the territory to continue demonstrating its appreciation of “this high level of confidence” reposed in it.

Mr Ibrahim further stated that the World Bank had set a target of providing grants support to 12,283 farmers and upgrading of 17 wet markets for the FCT Fadama CARES office.

He said, “It is to be implemented using the World Bank Programme for Result (P for R) financing model which is a relatively new concept of programmes/projects financing. This model requires the FCTA to invest its own resources, first by funding delivery platforms to start implementation, while the World Bank reimburses the FCTA after verification of achieved results by independent verification agents (IVAs) in line with agreed prices and targets earlier set for all DLIs.

“For us in result area II, our objective is to increase food security and safe functioning of the food supply chain under the FCT CARES programme. With a set of diverse but very critical programme stakeholders in this result area, this event becomes imperative in order to carry along these stakeholders from the onset of the programme’s implementation.’’