The Centre for Fiscal Transparency and Public Integrity (CeFTPI) on Tuesday highlighted key areas of concerns requiring clarifications in President Bola Tinubu’s N900 billion Renewed Hope Ward Development Programme (RHWDP).
According to a press statement by the CeFTPI, the Executive Director, Umar Yakubu, warned that “the absence of a clear implementation framework poses a significant risk to public integrity.”
The federal government launched the RHWDP in August 2025 to enhance livelihoods and promote economic growth at the grassroots level.
Part of the programme’s objective includes the empowerment of at least 1,000 people in Nigeria’s 8,809 wards with jobs and entrepreneurship.
The programme had an ambitious national goal of achieving a $1 trillion economy by 2030.
The government has since released N900 billion for part-implementation of the programme, which has been disbursed in tranches between September and November 2025.
However, the CeFTPI on Tuesday cautioned that “the programme is currently shrouded in opacity,” and open to misappropriation despite being a landmark initiative that envisions an average of N102.1 million per ward.
The Centre advised on the implementation of safeguards to prevent diversion of funds.
The red flags
According to the Centre, parts of the areas of ambiguity include the ‘ward paradox’, implementation agency, project specificity and audit trail.
Since wards are not constitutional tiers of government, the CeFTPI highlighted that the process of disbursement lacks clarity on whether the funds will be paid directly to contractors or through state administrations.
Similarly, both implementation agencies and the blueprint projects have not been identified, creating a risk to the misapplication of funds and defeating the objective of sustainable development that the project aims to achieve, the CeFTPI said.
The Centre also pointed out the audit burden as a result of 8,809 wards the initiative intends to reach. “With 8,809 distinct locations, the audit burden is immense. Without a digital, geo-tagged monitoring system, the risk of ‘ghost projects’ is extremely high,” it said.
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Therefore, the CeFTPI recommended public disclosure of guidelines by the Federal Account Allocation Committee (FAAC), launching an open data portal to track the progress and status of the projects intended in each ward, and the involvement of civil societies to monitor the project’s execution.
Following the approval of the N900bn RHWDP in August 2025, the government fully funded the initiative.
The scheme received an initial disbursement of N300 billion on 17 September 2025, followed by a second instalment of N400 billion in the same month and N200 billion in November 2025.
