Ninety women across Delta State have been empowered with melon shelling machines and generators, a gesture aimed at reducing the adverse economic impact of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) on their households.
The beneficiaries are among the 5,607 enrollees of the Delta Women Welfare Scheme, an intervention programme under which the state government pays the members monthly stipends for the upkeep of their homes, and as well their premiums to the state’s contributory health scheme to enable their households to access free healthcare.
The handing out of the melon shelling machines and generators, Tuesday, was done through the state’s Widows Welfare Scheme in collaboration with the Office of the Chief Job Creation Officer in Warri, venue for beneficiaries in Delta Central and South Senatorial Districts.
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Presenting the machines to the beneficiaries, the State Coordinator of the Widows Welfare Scheme, Isioma Okonta, said the exercise was borne out of Governor Okowa’s commitment to ameliorating the suffering of indigent widows who needed such support to scale through the challenges posed by the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Okonta said the benefiting widows were carefully selected upon physical verification from the three senatorial districts, and clarified to be among the vulnerable ones in the state.
He described the scheme as one of Governor Ifeanyi Okowa’s interventional programmes towards achieving his Stronger Delta vision and charged the beneficiaries to make judicious use of the items to generate income for themselves and their families.
Speaking on behalf of the widows, Efe Ohwfatshor (Uwvie LGA) and Ewule Atigbi (Warri South West) expressed their gratitude to the state government for the kind gesture and pledged to use the machines to improve their livelihood.
The highpoint of the event was the presentation of the machines to the widows from Delta Central and Delta South Senatorial Districts.
Those from Delta North District, it was learnt, would also get theirs from the state coordinator of the welfare scheme as they are among the 90 women the Job Creation Office released their items to the coordinator.
