The federal government has declared its intention to increase the number of schools benefitting from the National Home Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP) in Enugu State.
The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Mrs. Sadiya Umar-Farouq, stated this yesterday when she paid a courtesy visit to the Enugu State Governor, Mr. Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi.
The visit was on the sidelines of the recent stakeholders meeting for scaling up of the NHGSFP programme in the state.
Umar-Farouq, who was represented by the Ministry’s Director of Special Needs, Mrs. Nkechi Onwukwe, said that about nine million pupils had been benefitting from the programme in basic (primary) schools across the country.
She noted that since 2016, pupils in primaries one to three have been receiving one free nutritious meal daily during school terms nationwide.
The minister said that the NHGSFP is one of the components of the National Social Investment Programme (NSIP) meant to drive school enrollment, boost nutrition of the pupils, support local production of food and encourage employment and income generation.
She noted that President Muhammadu Buhari had graciously approved additional inclusion of five million pupils to be integrated into the ongoing NHGSFP programme.
She said: “For the up-grade to happen, we need to carry out enumeration in all states that are participating in the programme to know how many children are being fed; how many cooks have been employed.
She further noted that the ministry intended to get the actual number of pupils, cooks as well as identify some of the challenges and gaps that needed to be resolved before the upgrade of the number of pupils/schools would take place in the state.
The minister revealed that a total of 799 primary schools in the state had so far been enrolled in the programme with different variations of the number of pupils from primary one to three in each school.
“We learnt that the total basic school we have in the state is 1,200. After the enumeration we will see how the remaining 400 schools might be added so that each school in the state might be enrolled into the programme,’’ she explained.
