FG to spend over N1bn on school feeding daily

The Federal Government will spend over N1bn daily to feed primary school pupils in the National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme.

This comes as the cost of feeding a child per day has been released from N70 to N100.

At a two-day national consultative meeting on public food procurement which was held in Abuja on Wednesday, National Coordinator, National Social Investments Programme, Umar Bindir, said President Muhammadu Buhari approved the increase over the difficulty experienced in the implementation of the N70/child.

“When we started in 2016, that was before COVID-19, we had experienced difficulty with the implementation of the N70/child. We had made presentations as the (humanitarian) minister passionately made submissions to Mr. President.

“And Mr. President has graciously approved that we should raise the feeding (cost) from N70 to N100 per child. And the implementation of this programme has now commenced,” Bindir said.

With over 100 millions pupils on board, Bindir said it was normal to experience some hiccups in the implementation of the school feeding policy which provides a meal daily for pupils in year one to three in government-owned primary schools.

“There are issues where the formulae for the menu in many cases are not consistently adhered to, and so on and so forth. However, these are things that are natural when you have a big programme of this nature covering 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.

“We are feeding over 10 million children nationwide and you are bound to experience one or two hiccups here and there. But we are strengthening our monitoring and evaluation system and digitising the processes of delivery.”

 Bindir added, “We are also ensuring that payments to cooks continue to go directly to the cooks and we are now engaging even non-governmental organisations to participate in the verification and monitoring of the process.”