The national co-ordinator of the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP), Gertrude Quashigah, has made a passionate appeal to Parliament to take steps, as a matter of priority, to pass into law the Ghana School Feeding Programme Bill to give the scheme legislative backing.
The GSFP is a multisectoral programme with objectives covering education, agriculture, health and nutrition but, most importantly, poverty reduction and food security.
The main activities of the programme are: feeding schoolchildren, activities to promote health and nutrition, monitoring of feeding activities, sensitising stakeholders and the public about the programme’s work, promoting local agricultural production and providing a vehicle for increasing food production locally through the School Feeding initiative.
Speaking to Asaase News’s Wilberforce Asare on the sidelines of the Third Turkey-Africa Business and Economic Forum, after she took part in a panel discussion on 22 October 2021 under the banner of the “Turkey-Africa Women’s Leadership Dialogue”, Dr Quashigah said it is time to institutionalise the School Feeding Programme fully after 16 years of its existence.
The GSFP was launched in 2005 under the John Kufuor administration.
“We need to pass the GSFP law. We need to turn the GSFP into a full authority so we can stand on our own to expand the programme to give more permanent jobs to our women,” Dr Quashigah said.
“In doing this, we will be broadening the scope of the GSFP to ensure that the programme gets more attention in order to realise the goals for the School Feeding Programme,” she said.
Need for legal backing
Dr Quashigah said making the GSFP a statutory body will foster greater collaboration between the programme and stakeholders such as the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education.
The programme is also critically linked to a host of other government departments, notably the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection and the Ministry of Local Government, Decentralisation and Rural Development.
According to Dr Quashigah, a GSFP law would also allow the organisation to have a governing board, which would facilitate the establishment of other technical committees to help transform the programme into a sustainable, multimillion-dollar venture.
Government targets
At present, the government spends about GHC221 million on the programme each academic term to feed roughly 3.5 million schoolchildren across the country.
The government has tasked the GSFP to ensure that by the end of January 2022, all pupils (about 5.5 million in total) in primary and junior high schools in all 16 regions of the country are covered by the programme.
In anticipation of the January 2022 target, the GSFP has also been instructed to digitise all of its operations, from accounts to monitoring and evaluation to human resources, to make administration of the programme more attractive to potential investors.
Women’s Leadership Dialogue
A Turkey-Africa Women’s Leadership Dialogue Panel discussion was moderated by Berna Gozbasi, a board member of the Foreign Economic Relations Board of Turkey (DEIK) who is also the co-ordinating chair of the DEIK/Turkey-Africa Business Council.
Among the five members of the panel for the discussion were Her Excellency Nur Sagman, director general of Turkey’s ministry of foreign affairs, Aïssata Lam, director general of the Investment Promotion Agency of Mauritania (Apim), and Dr Amany Asfour, the interim president of the Africa Business Council.
Also on the panel were Dr Quashigah of the GSFP and Lebogang Zulu, who chairs the South African chapter of the BRICS Women’s Business Alliance and is the chief executive officer of the AV Group of Companies.
Wilberforce Asare
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