School feeding now covers 1.6 million children
Mr Akwesi Oppong-Fosu, Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Tuesday said about 1.6 million school children in 216 districts now benefit from the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) because of re-targeting.
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He said measures had also been put in place to increase the number from 1.6 million to two million by the end of the 2013/2014 academic year.
He said the re-targeting came about to enable school children in truly deprived public schools to benefit from the programme.
Mr Akwesi Oppong-Fosu said this during the opening of a two-day learning programme on national school feeding which brought together stakeholders to deliberate and come out with practical measures to improve the GSFP.
The meeting, sponsored by SNV, a Dutch NGO and Partnership for Child Development, an international NGO, were muted by the Procurement Governance for Home Grown School Feeding Programme (PGHGSFP) which is a unit under the GSFP.
The PGHGSFP, funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and managed by SNV, was aimed at enabling 10,000 small holder farmers, out of which 3,000 are women, to derive increased and stable income through effective participation in GSFP.
It was a four-year programme which is being implemented in two other countries; Mali and Kenya.
He said procuring food crops from small holder farmers for the GSFP in a co-ordinated participatory and strategic manner still remained a challenge.
“Therefore, creating alternative and viable markets for these smallholder farmers is expected to greatly boost local production and enhance income,” he added.
He expressed the hope that the leaning event would contribute to the learning of all other projects associated with GSFP and also make the PGHGSFP a learning hub for other countries.
Mr Seidu Adamu, National Co-ordinator, GSFP, appealed to caterers under the programme to endeavour to buy from farmers in their communities to enable the programme to achieve its objective of using home grown foods and put money into the pockets of local farmers.