Ghana School Feeding Programme needs reliable data – Gender Minister

The Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, Dr Agnes Naa Momo Lartey, has called for accurate and verifiable school enrolment records to ensure every child covered by the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) receives the meal intended for them.

She said reliable data was essential to the effective planning, budgeting and distribution of resources under the programme, which provides meals to more than 4.5 million children on every school day.

Dr Lartey made the call at a sensitisation workshop in Kumasi on Thursday for Regional and District Education Directors from the Ashanti and Western North Regions. The engagement focused on improving collaboration, data management and monitoring to strengthen programme delivery.

She explained that inaccurate enrolment figures could lead to resources being allocated to children who were not present, while schools with higher actual enrolment could receive insufficient food supplies.

The Minister therefore urged head teachers, class teachers and education authorities to work together to ensure that figures submitted for the programme were based on reliable school records and properly verified.

She stressed that the exercise was not intended to assign blame but to establish a dependable system that would ensure every eligible child received the meal provided under the programme.

Dr Lartey also highlighted the Government’s increased investment in school feeding, noting that the daily feeding grant had been raised from GH¢1.50 to GH¢2 per child. She added that efforts had been made to improve the nutritional quality of meals through practical nutrition training for 20,171 caterers and head cooks.

Speaking to the media on the sidelines of the workshop, the Minister said accurate data would also be crucial to plans to expand the programme. Reliable enrolment figures, she explained, would help the Government determine the resources needed to support any expansion and ensure that additional beneficiaries could be adequately catered for.

She further called for stronger collaboration between the Ghana School Feeding Programme Secretariat and the Ghana Education Service, particularly at the school and district levels, to improve monitoring, reporting and accountability.

Dr Lartey said effective coordination and reliable records would help ensure that resources were properly allocated and that the programme continued to deliver meals to the children it was designed to serve.