N-Power has revealed that 300,000 Nigerian graduates have been preselected for the physical verification stage of the Federal Government-run empowerment scheme.

While 350,000 people had applied for the programme last year, 2,543,079 people submitted applications for the 2017 recruitment, a 403% increase.

According to a breakdown released on N-Power's official Facebook page on Thursday, November 23, 2017, Lagos State has the highest number of applicants for this year's recruitment with 174,994 applications while Sokoto State has the lowest with 22,501 applications.

The breakdown revealed that new measures were introduced in 2017 to avoid the problems encountered in the previous year.

It read, "To avoid some payment issues that plague(d) the 2016 beneficiaries, the BVN validation stage was introduced. Here, applicants whose names didn't match their BVN were precluded from proceeding to the Assessment Test phase stage.

"2,258,266 people scaled through the BVN validation stage. They were consequently invited to proceed to the Assessment Test Phase. 1,746, 454 people honoured that invitation.

"In selecting the 300,000, we took the following into consideration: BVN validation and online assessment; achieving equity; linking selection to population using Federal Constituencies; addressing demand distribution of unemployed graduates; and taking into account, deployment/utilization issues from 2016.

"Others are: correcting deployment/utilization challenges among 2016 N-Power beneficiaries; rural-urban distribution balance (priority was given to the rural areas especially N-Agro applicants); and programme allocation - Teach/Agric/Health."

The press release noted that preselection of the 300,000 applicants does not equate final selection. The physical verification will be followed by compilation of results before final selection and then deployment.

Physical verification for the preselected applicants will hold between December 4 and December 14.