By Adedapo Adesanya
The federal government has said it would resume the National Home Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP) across the country by February with additional five million pupils across the country set to benefit.
The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Mrs Sadiya Umar Farouq, announced this on Monday at the 4th annual review of the scheme in Abuja.
“We are commencing the school feeding scheme immediately school resumes. We normally do the payment at the third week of the month. So, before the third week of February, we will be able to achieve some of these things. And we will be able to see an increment in school enrollment,” she said.
Mrs Farouq said additional five million pupils, including children in non-conventional educational settings, would be added to the scheme, saying that the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) has been added to NHGSFP, while Kwara State would be included in the coming months.
She said the NHGSFP would soon launch a capacity building exercise for vendors and enumeration of all beneficiaries on the programme.
“Plans have been concluded for the transition of the N-power batch A and B through the creation of the NEXT portal, which would allow those who choose to sign up to access other government empowerment opportunities.
“A beneficiary management system for the NSIPs is expected to be deployed in 2021 which would have the capacity to manage payments, address grievances and improve the dissemination of information,” she said.
NHGSFP programme manager, Kogi State, Mr Abdulkareem Suleiman, identified lack of logistics, communication gap and poor funding as some of the challenges faced by the organisation.
Mr Suleiman appealed to the federal government to increase funding and communication channels with state governments in order to achieve the aim of the scheme.
The NHGSFP is one of the Social Investment Programmes of the Federal Government of Nigeria. It is part of the N500-billion funded social investment programme designed by the government to tackle poverty and improve the health and education of children and other vulnerable groups – was put in place.
The programme aims to feed over 24 million schoolchildren, which will make it the largest school feeding programme of its kind in Africa. Nigeria has one of the highest burdens of childhood malnutrition. In fact, malnutrition disorders affect more than 42 per cent of schoolchildren in the country and are responsible for 49 per cent absenteeism of primary-school-age children.
The United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) estimates that 2.5 million Nigerian children under the age of five suffer from severe malnutrition each year, with about half a million children dying from it. This was the principal reason the President Muhammadu Buhari administration launched in June 2016 the NHGSFP in which pupils have one free meal a day.
Modupe Gbadeyanka