Nkonkonsa Celebrity Gossip From Africa
Ghanaian media personality and broadcaster, Serwaa Amihere has strongly condemned Ghana’s School Feeding Programme, pointing out several challenges that the initiative is encountering.
On 17 July 2024, while on GHOne TV, she mentioned a monitoring report from November 2019 by the Auditor General that highlighted instances of substandard food being provided to students.
She cited the case of pupils at Asokore Methodist Basic B School in the Eastern Region being served banku without soup and described the situation as “bizarre.”
“Can you imagine? Students were given banku without soup to eat with what? But that’s not all. There were complaints of food either lacking or having inadequate protein, foreign materials in the meals, bad palm oil served with watery beans, and a general bad smell and taste of food,” she said.
She observed that these problems are not fresh and have been a persistent issue within the school feeding program.
The Auditor General stated that caterers blame inadequate feeding fees and delayed payments for their inability to offer sufficient and nutritious meals.
At present, each student receives 1.20 cedis for a meal, a amount that Serwaa Amihere believes is inadequate for a nutritious meal.
She requested a higher feeding fee, proposing that 4 cedis per child would be better to guarantee adequate meals.
“How are you assigning GH₵1.20 worth to pupils to feed? What food do you expect them to eat and why won’t they give them banku without soup?
“If you also decide to work with the child average cost consensus on the African continent using the current dollar rates of GH₵15 to a dollar, that means the actual cost for a proper meal is about GH₵4 per child. That should give us some decent meals for the pupils,” she added.
She also condemned the government for prioritizing funds for other causes over the nutrition of school children.
“Just think about it and know the kind of country that we are in. Tell me if those who have allocated that amount of money as feeding grant will allocate that amount of money to their children… What can it buy for you? How much is waakye? How much is banku? How much is rice water or Tom Brown?
“Do they hate these students so much to give them that kind of food? You can’t tell me that that’s all that we can do. It’s not possible because we have clearly shown that we have money for other things. Very useless. But we do have money and so if we have money, isn’t that what we should be giving to the children?” she said.
NKONKONSA.com
