Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has directed that the school feeding programme be reintroduced to address the challenges of out-of-school children.
Former President Muhammadu Buhari’s government had suspended the programme after many years of running it.
But Tinubu ordered its restoration, saying it would help in checking the learning crisis.
He said if the learning crisis is not tackled, it will be difficult to address the challenges of out-of-school children.
This was disclosed by the Minister of Education, Prof Tahir Mamman, during a one-day retreat on quick wins in the middle Ministerial deliverables from 2023 to 2027.
According to the minister, the president directed that the school feeding programme be removed from the Ministry of Humanitarian and returned to the Ministry of Education.
The Minister said the essence of the retreat was to find ways of implementing all the policies developed to tackle the challenges and to distil responsibility to different agencies responsible for overturning the out-of-school children problem.
The National Home Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP) is a government-led N70 per day school feeding programme that aims to improve the health and educational outcomes of public primary school pupils. It uses farm produce locally grown by smallholder farmers to provide children with nutritious mid-day meals every school day. The programme links local farmers to the education sector by facilitating their access to the school feeding market.
Background
In 2004, the government of Nigeria piloted the implementation of Home Grown School Feeding beginning with 12 states selected from the six geopolitical zones. According to the government, over 300 million meals have been served to more than 7.5 million pupils in 46,000 Public Primary Schools in 22 states.
About 7.3 million children are estimated to be out of school in Nigeria; the majority of them are girls. The Nigerian government school feeding programme is to provide one meal per school day to all primary school pupils in Nigeria with the objectives of improving the health of school-age children, and increasing their enrolment, retention and completion rate in primary school.
The government believes that the feeding programme has greatly improved the nutrition status of Nigerian children. They said the continuation of the programme would go a long way to prevent malnutrition among public school children.
