Dr. Bah Says Nafa Project Sets To Cover 17000 Targeted Households In The Gambia
Dr. Amat Bah, the National Nutrition Agency (NaNA) Executive Director/Project Coordinator and the Nafa program has stated that they target to cover all the 17000 householdsNafa projects targeted in the Gambia to receive their nine cycles of payments before the project ends around February to March 2024.The project was supposed to last for three and half years.
In an interview with the VOD, after the first session of the second convergence meeting of the social safety net project held last December at the ChildFund Lodge Conference Hall in Bwiam.
Dr. Bah stated that the project has already gone half way while rating their performance back to World Bank rating that rated the Nafa program as satisfactory.
He confirmed that the project to be in safe hands from been rated satisfactory by the World Bank during their last mission.
It could be recalled that the convergence forum was prior to Gambia government received finance from the World Bank for the social safety net project to the tune of US$30 million with a counterpart funding of US$1 million from the Gambia government.
The project development objective was to improve the coordination of social assistance activities, provide temporal support to rural households in the wake of COVID-19 and increase inclusion of the extreme poor in the Nafa program.
The Nafa program was piloted in 3 districts before expanding to the remaining 17 districts. Since then, a lot of activities haven been done by the implementing partners.
The convergence availed project partners the opportunity to take stock of what has been accomplished, challenges faced and paved way forward for effective implementation and use of resources.
Dr Bah advanced that as the project coordinator, there has been so much progress and already heading to success. He noted that last February, they had a mid tem review of the project by the World Bank where all indications revealed that the project was heading towards a success.
“We have done baseline ofthe evaluation and we would be doing an end line evaluation to see what impact the project has on the beneficiaries that we have. So far, we have seen a lot of positives in terms alleviating the households that we have identified as extremely poor in terms of their performances,” he revealed.
“We have seen what they have done with the moneys that they have already received in terms of small businesses, investing in ruminants, in poultry farming, gardens. We have seen a lot of progress in this areas. We have also seen where they have invested into their children’s education, but we will have to wait until have do the final evaluation to see what impact the project has on the beneficiaries,” he concluded.
