Ghana’s School Feeding Programme: Taking a cue from India’s tragedy
The Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) is one of the most important social interventions by the Government to help boost enrolment in public basic schools, and it is yielding fruitful results.
The Programme provides one nutritious meal each school day for all infant and primary school children (4-12 years) and has the following short-term goals: Reduce hunger and malnutrition, increase school enrolment and attendance, and stimulate local food production.
Its long-term goals is to make a sustained contribution to poverty reduction and stable food supply by ensuring eight per cent real increase in incomes at national and community levels; eight per cent increased employment at community level; and greater availability, access, utilization and stability of food crops at community level.
In July this year, 19 of the 23 children who died after eating a tainted free school meal in India’s Bihar State were buried in and around their school premises.
The grief-stricken parents said they wanted their children’s graves to serve as a reminder that they died due to state negligence. Health authorities in India confirmed that a chemical used in pesticides was the likely cause of contamination of the fatal meal. Investigators believe the mustard oil used in cooking the meal had been contaminated with poisonous organophosphate pesticides.
In all, state officials said 47 primary school children fell ill after consuming the meal of rice and soybeans, while the headmistress of the government school in the village of Dharmasati Gandaman in Saran District fled the area.
The scale of the tragedy provoked violent protests from parents and relatives in Bihar, one of India poorest states, and anger throughout the country.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, authorities in the Eastern Indian state of Bihar have since ordered head teachers to taste all school lunches before they are served to pupils. India’s lunch meal programme is one of the biggest of such schemes in the world, covering more than 120 million children.
The entire world empathizes with the people of India on the occasion of this unfortunate incident, and hope that such tragedy does not occur in any country ever again.
Here at home in Ghana, the Ministry of Education, The Ghana Education Service (GES) and the GSFP must take a cue from the Indian experience by putting measures in place to prevent any such tragedy in the country.
To borrow from Douglas Adams: “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so”. Indeed, it is easy and better to learn from the mistakes of others than to learn by yourself the hard way.
The GES must ensure that “food tasting officers” (made up of nutritionists and teachers, perhaps) are appointed in schools where the School Feeding Programme is being implemented. These officers must eat the food to ascertain its wholesomeness for human consumption at least 45 minutes to lunch, before the children come in for it.
Since its inception, the GSFP has been bedevilled with numerous challenges including poor sanitation, low quality of food served, delays in paying caterers and lack of transparency. More efforts need to be put in by the Government to address the teething problems to ensure efficiency and also extend it to cover more schools. It is very remarkable that the Children’s Shadow Report on the Convention on the Rights of the Child has urged government to scale up the school feeding programme to all schools, especially those in rural areas.
At this stage we need to also ensure that our future leaders do not just consume anything but good and quality food to enable them to develop to their fullest potential. Let Ghana’s School Feeding Programme serve as another example that would be envied by the rest of Africa and the world.
By Iddi Yire
Source: GNA