The Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP), launched in 2005, is believed to be serving as the basis for Ghana’s social protection strategy, which encourages more children to attend school and have daily access to a meal.
To Dr. Might Kojo Abreh, the School feeding programme has solved a number of problems for a couple of vulnerable families and disadvantaged families.
Therefore, the Senior Research Fellow in Educational Planning at the Institute for Educational Planning and Administration (IEPA) at UCC, believes “we need to sustain it because it is a social service enterprise.”
However, the running of the programme by government has not been without some challenges.
Recent challenges have been the irregularities in payments to caterers.
A study with Dr. Abreh as one of the authors which explored resilience in the Ghana School Feeding Programme from the Perspective of Caterers also found that caterers would want government to resolve the inadequacies and irregularities of payments.
“People have to leverage on loans, leverage on credit to engage school feeding in the wake of the fact that they are complaining about the inadequacy of the amount and then irregularity of payments.”
Speaking exclusively to ATL FM NEW, Dr. Might Abreh indicated that the difficulties the caterers face are hard realities that need to be looked at more carefully to sustain the shocks.
Meanwhile, he says to deal with caterers buying foodstuff on credit the country must reconsider home-grown school feeding.
“In the past, we had the arrangements of school gardens. So, schools had their gardens. They could harvest vegetables and all that can be used in preparing food for them. Could we revisit that?”
Also, there are alternative and modern agriculture practices that have come up lately. Could all those be explored so that the hard realities that are being faced could be reengaged to the point that school feeding can be once more resilient than we have it now,” Dr. Might Abreh noted.
On his part, Professor Julius Hagan, an Associate Professor in Animal Breeding and Genetics at the Department of Animal Science, School of Agriculture, (UCC), stated that the school feeding programme is fraught with many challenges.
He, however, recommends that “One of the surest ways to overcome it is for especially schools with lands to grow their own crops – maize, soya bean.
Most of the crops they use in their feeding they can plant them on their own,” he said.
According to Prof Hagan, another way of addressing the problem is government liaising with farmers to supply products for the preparation of meals for the school children.
“The government can also liaise with farmers to be able to supply. If you know the quantity of a particular product they need, then the farmers will produce it. And if farmers know that there is a direct market or ready market for their produce, I don’t think it should be a problem.”
If all school children are supplied with eggs, that is a direct or ready market for most commercial poultry farmers,” he continued.
Source: Rosemond Asmah/ATLFMNEWS
