Step up monitoring of School Feeding Programme to block leakages
Send Ghana, a civil society organisation, is calling on the Ghana Education Service (GES) to step up monitoring of the enrolment data captured under the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) to block leakages.
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The recommendation, which comes on the back of a study conducted by SEND Ghana, is to help block possible leakages and also ensure effective planning and budgeting for the programme.
The Country Director of SEND Ghana, Mr George Osei-Bimpeh, in an interview on March 27, said the inconsistency in the school enrollment data provided by caterers, schools and district education directorates made it difficult to determine the actual number of pupils that were fed.
That, he said, could result in the caterers being underpaid or overpaid, something which had an impact on government expenditure.
“When the caterers are giving you numbers that are different from what the school authorities are giving you; numbers in terms of how many they have fed and how many days, then it means there is something happening,” he said.
He added, “So if one is saying I have fed 100 pupils in three days, then you go to the directorate, and you are getting 200 pupils being fed for five days, there is something happening. The way it is, we can only say it is a leakage because the data is inconsistent.
He, therefore, recommended that, “The GES must also step up its monitoring activities and ensure that enrollment data captured by schools and district directorates are consistent with each other as a measure to block possible leakages and to engender effective and efficient planning and budgeting.”
Other recommendations
The study also recommended that there was the need for effective monitoring of the programme to ensure that food that was nutritious and safe for consumption was served to the children.
It also said the dying interest emanating from school management committees (SMC) and the general citizenry in the programme must be resuscitated. This was critical for providing feedback to improve the implementation of the programme.
Another recommendation is that the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) must also make provision in their annual plans and budgets to support monitoring of school feeding desk officers to complement the efforts of zonal coordinators.
Some findings
The study, titled: “Who is monitoring? A potential financial leakage in the Ghana School Feeding Programme,” was to assess the implementation of the programme at the local level by verifying the number of pupils fed and the frequency to which they were fed so as to provide feedback to stakeholders for effective management.
A sample of 15 districts was purposively selected from the Greater Accra, Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions for the study.
The study highlighted that although the policy stipulated daily feeding, averagely, schoolchildren were fed only three times in a week.
It also found that delayed reimbursement of funds to caterers affected the frequency of feeding.
The report also found that it was difficult to determine which of these different data as provided by the three stakeholders were paid for by the government. This situation predisposes the programme to data manipulation and possible financial leakages.
“Although adopting the caterer model for service provision is laudable, appropriate storage facilities and the quality of food prepared could not be guaranteed,” the report added.
