School Feeding Programme: FG to capture additional 5m pupils before 2023 – Minister

The Federal Government says it will upscale the National Home Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP) to capture additional five million pupils before 2023.

The Minister for Humanitarian Affairs, Sadiya Farouq, stated this in Ibadan on Tuesday at a stakeholders’ meeting for enumeration of beneficiaries and scaling up of NHGSFP in Oyo State.

Farouq, represented by the ministry’s Director of Finance and Accounts, Dr Matthew Dada, said Nigeria had taken innovative and decisive measures in fighting absolute poverty and its attendant consequences.

She noted that the meeting was to strengthen the partnership in the state and mutual recognition to do more on NHGSFP so as to bring more Nigerians under the government’s social protection mechanism.

“Over nine million pupils benefit from one free nutritious meal a day during school term nationwide and now, we have the mandate to reach additional five million pupils by 2023.

“With more than 100,000 cooks employed and over 100,000 small-holder farmers participating in this value chain, NHGSFP has great potentials for socio-economic development and it needs to be strengthened, scaled up and sustained nationwide,” she said.

Farouq noted that the additional five million pupils should be achieved between now and 2023, stressing that the enumeration exercise was imperative to address the challenges facing the programme for effectiveness.

“There are problems on ground among the stakeholders, as not all stakeholders agree with the data that we have.

“The second thing is that the data are not good enough for analysis and impact assessment purposes, and that is why we are improving on the quality of the data by getting more stakeholders involved.

“This is to ensure transparency, inclusiveness, accountability and integrity of the data so that we can also measure the impact of NHGSFP. This is also good for better planning and implementation,” she said.

The Consultant in-charge of the enumeration exercise, Mr Olatunbosun Jaiyeola, said with the cooperation of the stakeholders, the exercise would be successful.

Jaiyeola, of Net Trix Solution Limited, noted that youth corps members would be trained, starting from Wednesday, on data capturing for NHGSFP into the central server that would be processing and saving the data.

“This will ensure that the right pupils are the ones to benefit, as each will have a unique identification number.

“We are in charge of the technicality of this project, that is, how the enumeration goes on, how the data are saved and processed as well as how to ensure that pupils get what they are supposed to get.

“We will be on ground to provide any technical support, as the capturing exercise is ongoing, for us to have better education for our children,” Jaiyeola said.

In their separate remarks, the Permanent Secretaries, Ministries of Women Affairs and Education in the state, Mrs Christianah Abioye and Mrs Aminat Atere respectively, said that NHGSFP had helped to increase enrolment in public schools across the state.