Stakeholders query allocation of pupils under school feeding

Organizations tracking the home-grown school feeding programme of the federal government in Kaduna State have rejected the current allocation of pupils to cooks supplying food to schools under the programme.

The stakeholders said a situation where a cook caters for over a thousand pupils is not acceptable and called for a standardized maximum of 150 pupils per cook.

The federal government is feeding 9.5 million primary I to 3 pupils in 32 states and the FCT daily under its’ Home-Grown School Feeding Programme (HGSFP).

The stakeholders made up of Action Aid Nigeria, Connecting Gender for Development, Girl Child Concern, Federation of Muslim Women Association of Nigeria (FOMWAN), Association and Nigerian Popular Theatre Alliance with funding from MacArthur Foundation noted that several aspects in the programme need to be fine-tuned.

Deliberating at a meeting organized to share experience on the advocacy visits and strategize on approaches to community engagement using existing community structures, the stakeholders noted that while the Federal Government is expending huge resources on the programme, huge amounts are still being siphoned through various corrupt practices by officials involved in the implementation of the programme.

They noted that some cooks are facing illegal deduction from banks in their allocated funds to feed assigned pupils, while there is alleged connivance of government officials with the banks to swindle some of the cooks.

They also observed that some men handling ATM cards of the cooks are making illegal withdrawals on behalf of the vendors, while there are political interference in recruitment and deployment of the cooks to schools.

Other observations made by the stakeholders include Inflation of pupils’ enrollment for fraudulent purposes by the school administrators, as well as bottlenecks in the supply chain of eggs leading to shortages such that one egg is shared to four pupils in some schools.