The Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) is said to have lost its direction as its services do not get to the intended deprived communities in the districts across the country.
Rather, schools in district and regional capitals are covered leaving the intended rural, deprived and poor communities uncovered.
The concept of the GSFP, according to experts at an orientation workshop in Takoradi, was to provide ready market for locally produced foodstuff in the deprived communities, but its concentration in the urban areas was not helping the cause.
Sadly according to the experts, foodstuff produced in the intended deprived local communities by poor farmers are also not patronised, leaving the local communities more disadvantaged and poorer than before.
The focus of the GSFP, they said, was to target deprived communities across the country and not those in urban and district capitals. But the programme has been overly concentrated in urban centers.
With the Western Region as an example, a chunk of the beneficiaries in the region are in the Sekondi/Takoradi Metropolitan area and other district and municipal capitals, while the deprived communities have less or no coverage at all.
The Sekondi/Takoradi alone has 26 schools, with 10,958 pupils benefiting, while other districts with high rate of deprivation have little or no coverage.
According to the Assistant Director at the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, Mrs Irene Mercibah, based on the principle of the programme, the menu should be 80 per cent purely locally produce foodstuff but that was not the case.
She said another objective of the programme was to contribute to poverty reduction and to improve food security in deprived communities.
The assistant director said the bigger concept encompassed the ministry of food and agriculture, and other technical ministries and its foreign partners to ensure that GSFP provided the ready market for the locally produced foodstuffs and thereby help in the transformation of the local economy.
She explained that if the programme did not get to the deprived communities as expected, those who would be buying in the urban centers had to settle for high prices which would not help compared to the amount allocated to a child in the beneficiary schools.
Mrs Mercibah said some of the objectives were also to increase school enrolment, attendance, and retention and to reduce short term hunger and malnutrition among schoolchildren to boost domestic food production.
The Deputy Western Regional Minister, Ms Betty Bosumtwi-Sam said it was wrong for deprived areas to be left out or givien limited coverage.
She said while the metropolis had 10,958 pupils in 26 schools benefiting under it, Prestea/Huni-Valley had five schools with 1,431 pupils, Shama also had five with 4,849 pupils, Amenfi East with seven schools with 3,206 and Bia with 6 schools with 3,338 pupils.
Ms Bosumtwi-Sam said another problem worthy of note was the corrupt practices that characterised the programme, which nearly incurred the displeasure of the donor partners to withdraw their support if transparency and proper accounting systems were not applied.
That aside, she said sadly, some of the beneficiary schools had very poor structures to accommodate the activities of the caterers.
Other key sectors such as agriculture, education and health had been neglected thereby depriving the programme of its contribution.
Participants at the workshop were taken through financial management for the GSFP, the responsibilities of the district assemblies, sample of equipment procedures among others.
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