School Feeding Programme; a promising venture bogged down in bottlenecks

By Ebenezer Hanson
In 2005, the Government of Ghana with support from the Government of Netherlands launched the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP), amid high hopes of improving enrollment and ensuring children do not abandon school because of hunger.
Since its inception, the programme has recorded some achievements in the areas of school enrolment and retention of pupils in beneficiary schools. According to the second research report by SEND-Ghana in 2008, the programme is feeding 595,000 pupils in public primary schools with the aim of scaling up the figure to the benefit of 1,040,000 children by the end of 2010. The programme, SEND-Ghana further reveals, has so far spent a total of 65.7 million Ghana Cedis. The research covered 23 schools in 21 districts in the Upper East, Upper West, Northern and Greater Accra Regions, where SEND has its operations.
Nevertheless, the research unearthed countless, disturbing hiccups which are rendering the objectives of the rather promising project unrealizable. The bottlenecks identified include; the lack of basic infrastructural services, health challenges and the non-provision of certain expected agricultural services by the relevant agencies.
For instance, “About 61% of the beneficiary schools did not have good kitchen structures. This has adversely affected the maintenance of hygienic environment for food preparation,” the report revealed.
Similarly, 78% of the beneficiary schools did not have adequate stocks of kitchenware especially plates and cups. As a result, pupils were required to eat in turns.
“This coping strategy unduly prolonged lunch breaks in the affected beneficiary schools, thus reducing contact/instructional hours with negative effects on education”.
On the health front, the report identified untrained catering services providers, non-observable of basic health standards though teachers were especially trained to provide pupils with health education. There was also no checks on Body Mass Index of pupils and about 43% of the pupils were not de-wormed since 2007. The research also observed that personnel of the Ghana Education Service (GES) were not involved in the monitoring of food prepared as the emphasis is only on just providing a meal for a pupil.
In addition, the research found that Farmer Based Organizations (FBOs) did not act as linkage source for the supply of foodstuffs to beneficiary schools. Thus farmers were not benefiting from the GSFP. “Stakeholders from nearly 87% of beneficiary communities indicated that farmers did not benefit from any form of extension services. Similar to the health service experience, District Directors of Agriculture were not active in the programme implementation. Almost none of them were aware of the plans, objectives and strategies of the GSFP.”
Again on education, the assessment indicates that, contrary to expectations the supply of high value education service was generally lacking due to poor pupil teacher which stands at 83:1. However, the pupil-teacher ratio captured in the report seems to be at variance with the nation’s figure reported in 2007 Annual Progress Report of Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy (GPRS 2). The Pupil/Teacher ratio for primary school was 34:1 and 18: 1 for Junior High School (JHS) in 2007.
While the Report blames the lack of collaboration among the complementary services for the challenges of the GSFP, the programme is also tottering under the yoke of financial crisis.
The revelation was contained in Parliament's Committee on Local Government report on the 2009 Annual Budget Estimates of the Ministry presented to the House.
According to the Report, the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) is likely to miss its target of feeding 800,000 pupils this year unless the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development finds an amount of over 46 million Ghana cedis to finance its budgetary gap.
While the GSFP needs 63,823,980.00 Ghana cedis to achieve its objective, the Ministry only allocated it 17 million Ghana cedis, creating a shortfall of 46,823,980.00 Ghana cedis
"The Committee noted that despite the intention of the Ghana School Feeding Programme to increase its coverage to over to 800,000 pupils at a cost over 63,823,980.00 Ghana cedis the Ministry has allocated only 17 million Ghana Cedis to the programme," the Committee observed with regret.
It therefore recommends strongly to the Ministry that the total amount for the programme should be sourced from the HIPC or MDRI funds for the year 2009.
Ghana Government provides the bulk of the funds for the programme and the Netherlands, which complemented it with 50% of the feeding cost, suspended the arrangement in the latter part of 2007. Hon. Joseph Yieleh Chireh told the Public Agenda in an interview that the Netherlands suspended their funding because of the adverse findings made against the GSFP Secretariat by the Pricewater House Audit Report. Nevertheless, the Committee takes consolation in the fact that "the Dutch Government is prepared to contribute about 12.8 million Ghana cedis to the feeding programme if its activities are streamlined and its house put in order."
The first National Co-ordinator of GSFP, Dr. Kwame Amoako Tufour lost his job over the findings, and was replaced by Mr. Michael Nsowah, a former Director General of the Ghana Education Service.
The Committee recommends, among other things, the establishment of a Ghana School Feeding Fund, the use of proceeds from National Lotteries, and that of the Nutrition Component of the National Health Insurance Scheme as well as applying portions of either the Communication Service Tax or the GETFund to address the Programme’s financial problems.
A representative of the Ministry Of Local Government and Rural Development who was present at the SEND-Ghana Report launch made some pointed remarks which seemed to have summed up the difficulties confronting the programme. She put the blame right on the manner the programme was conceived and implemented.
“I am not surprise about the outcome of the study. The Programme started without a lot of orientation and sensitization leading to varied interpretations of the project concept and until this is addressed the problems will recur,” she submitted. She added that the nature of the GSFP calls for a lot of collaboration which requires a lot of commitment.
The foregoing amply shows that the GSFP requires a complete overhaul to dissect the myriads of challenges buffeting it, and the appropriate solutions found to fix them. Another lesson is that similar future programmes need to be thought out well and wider consultations with all stakeholders have to done to get everybody on board. This is the only way to preclude the recurrence of some of the teething problems.
As Prof. Ellen Bortei-Doku Aryeetey, Senior Research Fellow at ISSER, University of Ghana, observed in her review of the Report, the document should not serve as the basis for crucifying the programme but rather it should spur on all stakeholders to work towards the improvement of the programme.
“From a policy practice point of view the low marks obtained relative to some of the benchmarks should serve as opportunities for improving the implementation process, rather than a platform for the condemnation of the programme,” emphasized Prof. Aryeetey, who is also Head of Centre for Social Policy Studies, University of Ghana.All stakeholders should ensure that this commendable pro-poor programme does not fail as the full realization of its objectives will propel the nation on in her quest to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 1 which requires that Ghana eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by 2015