SFTAS is wholly-financed with a loan amount of $750 million from the International Development Association (IDA), a member of the World Bank Group.
The Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mrs. Zainab Shamsuna Ahmed, made the disclosure in a statement released Wednesday in Abuja by the ministry’s Director of Press and Public Relations, Mr. Hassan Dodo.
She explained that the disbursement followed the participation of the 24 eligible states in the recent Annual Performance Assessment (APA) carried out by the Office of the Auditor General for the Federation (OAuGF) as the Independent Verification Agent (IVA) in collaboration with a third party firm, JK Consulting Limited and the SFTAS Programme Coordination Unit (PCU).
The 24 beneficiary states who met the eligibility criteria are Abia, Adamawa, Bauchi, Benue, Delta, Edo, Ekiti, Enugu,Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Kogi, Kwara, Niger, Ondo, Ogun,Oyo, Osun, Sokoto, Taraba and Yobe States.
Ahmed noted that the SFTAS programme was established by the federal government with a concessional loan of $750 million to support states through the provision of performance-based grants to the tune of $700 million, and technical assistance in the sum of $50 million to enhance their capacity to achieve the Disbursement- Linked Indicators (DLIs) otherwise known as the programme results.
According to the statement, the DLIs are derived from the country’s 22-Point Fiscal Sustainability Plan (FSP) and the 14 Open Government Partnership (OGP) commitments aimed at strengthening fiscal transparency, accountability and sustainability across all states of the federation.
Kaduna State achieved the highest number of results and got N3,960,000,000, while Katsina and Benue got the least amount of N540,000,000 each.