Sustainability Challenges Faced by the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP)

The Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) as describe on their website www.schoolfeeding.gov.gv “is an initiative of the comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP) pillar 3 which seeks to enhance food security and reduce hunger in line with the United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s 2010-2015)”. CAADP is an initiative of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD, 2003) that seeks to “Help African countries reach higher growth through agriculture- led development which eliminates hunger, reduces poverty and food insecurity and enables expansion of exports”.

As a policy measure, the Government of Ghana in 2005 piloted the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) to provide food to children at school. The objective was to reduce hunger, malnutrition and increase enrolment and retention and secondly boost domestic food production in deprived communities of the country.

The GSFP is governed by the Programme Steering Committee (PSC) Formerly Chaired by the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development (MLGRD), until 20^th July, 2015, now been chaired by the Ministry of Gender and Social Protection, with Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development (MLGRD) and partnership from International agencies including the World Bank, the World Food Programme, the partnership of Child Development and UNICEF as well as international organisations including Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the US Agency for International Development(USAID) and the Dutch Embassy, SEND and other development partners.

The GSFP has a National Secretariat, Regional Coordinating Office (RCO’s) and District Implementation Committee’s (DIC’s) chaired by the Metropolitan/ Municipal/ District Chief Executives’ (MMDCEs’). These structures are in place to provide for the effective management, monitoring and implementation of the programme.

GSFP is a two component policy initiative which seeks to increase accessibility and quality of education at the same time boost local agricultural productivity. GSFP over the years has been plagued with sustainability questions; most prominent among them is the availability of funds. After, ten years of implementation, I believe this should not be a problem.

According to government the programme is to feed 1,740,000 pupils in 4,881 schools nationwide amounting to GHȼ 135,295,371.00 for the 2015 year whiles the amount sound gargantuan it translates to only GHȼ 0.50p per school going days per child. According to the GSFP National Secretariat, government as at July had released an amount of GHȼ 82 million to caterers they owned for the second quarter of 2015. This was the last payment made as at 14^th November, 2015. Delayed payments, bad sanitation practices of the catering staff and the use of substandard ingredients which lack any nutritional value are been used to feed the children, exposing them to serious health risk. On countless occasions children had to be rushed to the hospital after eating their daily meals. This defeat’s programmes focal objective i.e. promoting good health in children and improving access and quality of learning. Since children cannot learn with empty stomachs.

The GSFP saw some successes from its inception due the small number of beneficiaries, but as the programme grew government is being overwhelmed by the increasing number of beneficiaries. By, not translating lessons learnt from the pilot project to National School Feeding Policy they have loss some control of the programme. One criterion which the programme failed to establish was how regular monitoring of beneficiary schools and caterers would be funded. Even though the DIC’s have been mandated to monitor the programme in their areas, funding of their activities has been left to the District Assembly’s where there is the constraint for fund allocation with other relevant projects and programmes such Schools Under Trees Programme (SUTP), Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) and other Infrastructural improvement programmes. This has deprived the DIC’s with the needed capacity to function effectively in their Districts. Therefore, weekly, monthly and quarterly monitoring activities have been relaxed. Most monitoring activities are done when monies are to be paid to the caterers, therefore proper supervision is lacking throughout the year. Whilst PSC, National Secretariat and RCO’s the do not regularly monitor the DIC’s to collect challenges and requirement that can ensure proper plan implementations of the programme.

They rather develop top to bottom strategies which have little effect in improving the major challenges currently being faced by the GSFP, for example, the new electronic payment system. This system would rather create a fissure between DIC’s, caterers, RCO’s and the PSC. With this approach the caterers receive monies directly from the National Secretariat on their phones via mobile money, making DIC’s power and control over the caterers less.

With the outlined challenges below, how is the electronic payment system going to resolve them?

When one visits the schools you may realise that the number of caterers presented to the secretariat to be on the programme are lesser than the actual number of caterers in a particular school. Whilst some caterers are over seeing more than one school that is over making daily monitoring very difficult due to the poor nature of the roads in these districts as a result their employees mismanage resources given to them. Due to serious political interference most caterers were contracted without going through the proper procurement processes. In other cases the wife of the DIC chair is the only caterer operating in the district. In some instances influential party members would be contracted, whilst they have no experience in catering services.

It’s therefore not surprising when DIC’s monitoring teams get to a school with the list presented to the secretariat and the teachers there do not know or have not heard of the names reported to be in their school register. Other times these children had completed or left the school long ago but have their names are listed as students of that particular school. This increases the number of pupils on the programme.

From reports of figures on monitoring done by DIC’s and RCO’s indicates that student population inflation for some schools under the GSPF is between 35%-45%. Government can save between GHȼ47,353,379.80 - GHȼ60,882,917.00 if these “ghosts” can be removed from the list. These huge amounts could be used to run the operations of the RCO’s and the DIC’s for year. When these savings are made more children could be added to programme at no extra cost. Rather these amounts are being used to feed “ghost”. With this information available one may ask, when these excess is paid, into whose pockets does it go? I will not say government but I can confidently say that it goes into the pockets of their cohorts and allies.

Moreover, the local agricultural development aspect of the GSFP has been dormant, while people speak about financial challenges within the program. The farmer has been neglected and who cares about the farmer. It’s shocking to see caterers using imported rice, chicken, oil and fish to prepare meals for the children. The most surprising aspect of this is that, these caterers are usually those, whose, food prove to be of good appearance, taste and nutritional value. Menus for preparation of meals lack innovation with some caterers cooking one type of food for the whole term.

Those who use local food stuffs are most at times caught being mischievous. I am not saying that there are no good local food stuffs in the market or those who use local foodstuffs produce substandard meals but what has been observed is that they buy the substandard produce from malicious market women. Since local product lacks proper branding, caterers may sometimes be deceived by the market woman into buying one brand whilst they sell an inferior product to them unawares. In the long run the market woman is cheating the caterer, the caterer is cheating the programme and government is losing huge sum of monies. In, all this vicious cycle the local farmer is losing out on his share of the national cake.

Paucity of innovation from the agricultural sector has rendered them dormant in the GSFP. Even though the GSFP can provide local farmers with ready market valued at over GHȼ100,000,000.00 per year in direct investment. Affording farmers with the potential to grow and increase productivity. The Ministry of Food and Agriculture is yet to tap into this vast potential the programme can provide to their farmers.

With all these challenges the GSFP is failing and may not be sustainable in the future for government to operate any more. As domestic debt, budgetary deficits, GDP to debt ratios and balance of payments is rising each year. Government may soon take austerity measures to meet budgetary requirement and GSFP may be one of the policies to be abrogated.

There is still hope, whilst the sunshine’s. Ten years implementation of GSFP has provided the PSC, RCO’s and DIC’s with a wealth of knowledge that can be developed into proper implementation plan using the bottom up mechanism of accountability and transparency, making the local governance structure more involved in the implementation process of the GSFP.

In concluding, if the National Secretariat would apply good project, program and portfolio management principles through a well-developed and coordinated multi-sectorial policy integration implementation process devoid of the usual one man takes all approach to policy implementation in Ghana and political interference. Whist employing, strong linkages between, the local economic policies and National economic policies through effective decentralized structures the GSFP could become sustainable. Coupled with improved agricultural and natural resource management and increased socially inclusive development practices. This can provide the programme with a strong bases in becoming a nationwide programme where all public schools can be capture under the GSFP.

November 14, 2015