FG spends N3.7bn to feed 1.2 million pupils

The Federal Government (FG) has released N3.77 billion for the feeding of 1,287,270 school children in nine states under the HomeGrown School Feeding Programme.

This is was announced on Sunday by the Senior Special Assistant to the Acting President, Mr Laolu Akande. He said the benefiting states, comprising Anambra, Enugu, Oyo, Osun, Ogun, Ebonyi, Zamfara, Delta and Abia,  received various sums in tranches.

He also said that 14,574 cooks were engaged in the communities where the schools were located. According to Akande, the money is paid directly from the FG’s coffers to the cooks, with a slight variation in Osun State where some of the food items, such as eggs, were bought centrally by an aggregator.

He added that the federal government intended to feed no fewer than three million pupils in 2017 under the feeding Programme, an aspect of the Social Investment Programme (SIP) of the Buhari presidency