World Bank boosts FG’s youth empowerment scheme with N756m for 81 beneficiaries

World Bank boosts FG's youth empowerment scheme with N756m for 81 beneficiaries
The World Bank, under its Growth and Employment (GEM) project, has approved N756. 3 million for payment to 81 young Nigerian innovators who participated in the 2016 Aso Rock innovation Demo Day (AVDD).
The AVDD is one of the monetary empowerment endeavours of the present supervision. A document obtained from the World Bank-funded TREASURE project on Monday in Abuja, showed that the bucks would be disbursed to the beneficiaries in two tranches after a give signing ceremony earlier slated for end of Mar.
The AVDD, in effort with GEM project, encouraged strategy submissions from individuals that participated in the regional pitch screening situations that occurred in Lagos, Port-Harcourt and Abuja from which the 81 beneficiaries emerged.
According to the document, “the GEM job requested for submission of business proposals from entitled people of the AVDD 2016 programme of which 289 job seekers were screened before the final and  81 were eventually picked after having a rigorous process of vetting”. The GEM doc showed that most 81 published applications passed the 55 per cent cut-off point and environmental and cultural compliance check. 
Other details contained in the doc showed that the beneficiaries were drawn from Akwa Ibom, Anambra, Bauchi, Combination River, Delta, FCT, Kaduna, Kwara, Lagos, Nasarawa, Osun, Oyo, Plateau and Estuaries and rivers states, while 20 others were yet to be registered on the website. 
A breakdown of the grant disbursement process shows that submission of company registration documents for approval is ongoing. The file showed that “a total of 36 of the 81 job seekers have posted the required company enrollment and legal documents to date.
Details of the 2016 AVDD emerged from a national technological advancement competition held in Lagos, Port Harcourt and Abuja. The Federal Government in the beginning gave grants to the best three of the 30 innovators that surfaced from the regional competition who were invited to participate in the grand finale of the AVDD 2016 held at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.