Listen to this articleEnugu, Nigeria: As Mercy Eze’s footsteps echoed through the empty school hallways, the sound was accompanied by a low rumbling from her hungry stomach. It is almost the end of day at Community Primary School in Ama-Agu, Enugu state, and Mercy had just returned from selling star apples, or Udala, at the market in order to earn money for her own lunch.
For Mercy, breakfast is a luxury that her grandmother, whom she lives with, can not always provide. When she is able to eat breakfast before going to school, it is a cause for celebration and when there was no breakfast before school, “my hopes would be on our school food but we are no longer given food,” she says.
In the Global Hunger Index, Nigeria ranks 109 out of 125, indicating that the level of hunger is serious. This has a disproportionate impact on children. According to a UNICEF report, 32% of children under five are stunted and at least 2 million children suffer from severe acute malnutrition. These conditions are a major contributor to school absenteeism.
To address this, a National Home Grown School Feeding Program aimed at feeding primary school pupils was launched in 2005 by the then president Olusegun Obasanjo. It was discontinued after two years and revived in 2015 when Muhammadu Buhari came to power.
The program had a two-fold purpose: to improve students’ health and education outcomes and to support local farmers and cooks. It achieved these goals with a budget of N70 per child per day but only lasted from 2016 to January 2023 due to alleged diversion of funds.
Ugwuoke Patricia, the school’s head teacher says, “the absence of this meal has brought about a drastic reduction in the enrollment rate of the pupils, lack of concentration during classes, malnutrition and contributed immensely to the poor performance among the school children.” She adds that in the morning, attendance is usually high, but many students do not return to class after lunch.
In December 2023, President Bola Tinubu approved the continuation of the school feeding program, which was intended to serve basic educational levels. However, less than a month after the approval, the Federal Government suddenly suspended the program.
Peter Udosen, a Nigerian education and development expert based in the UK, believes that the challenges facing the feeding program, including its inconsistency, can be addressed by strengthening the local government’s participation in the program. “With improved personnel and infrastructure, local governments can manage the program more effectively,” he says.
Millions of children benefitted
The program had several objectives. When it was operational, it reached millions of students across all 30 of the program’s beneficiary states, providing balanced diet meals. It also employed thousands of cooks and farmers, and it had a measurable impact on school enrollment.
According to then vice president, Yemi Osinbajo, the program was responsible for a 20% increase in primary school enrollment nationwide.
The National School Feeding Program relies on a collective effort from farmers, cooks, and community school headteachers to purchase, prepare, and distribute meals. Onah Ifeanyi, the program’s manager in Enugu state told The SolutionsPaper that, “the process of meal delivery in Enugu is that the federal government pays money directly into the accounts of the cooks, depending on the number of pupils assigned per cook.”
The cooks purchase ingredients from local markets, prepare meals based on a daily menu, and serve the students in their classrooms. Patricia, the head teacher, explains that after the food is delivered to the school, it is handed over to the teachers, who distribute it among the students during break time. A variety of meals are provided, including rice, beans and stew, moin-moin, Okpa, and Fufu and soup. These meals provided the students with nutritious and filling meals that supported their learning and development.
Without the program, children have to find other ways to get food, and that means waking up at 5 a.m to pick fruit to sell. Even then, Mercy says she could only afford a small meal, and her time in school was spent worrying about her next meal.
“When we search for them, we find them under cashew trees, mango trees, and palm trees picking fruits to sell. When we investigated, we found that they do not get breakfast from home and are hungry which is why they always go out like that to find what to eat. We cannot punish them because punishing them will not take the hunger away,” Ugwuoke Patricia says.
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Issues that require addressing
The School Feeding Program had a ripple effect that went beyond just feeding the students. It created job opportunities for women cooks boosting productivity in communities across Nigeria.
However, many of the caterers complained that they were not being paid. In Delta, a state in Nigeria’s south-south, the program had been dormant for three years before it was discontinued in 2023 due to a lack of consistent payment to caterers.
According to a BusinessDay report, the cooks had not been given money to cook and feed the students as outlined in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that was signed between the Federal and state government.
Peter Udosen, who is also a teacher with years of experience in the public school system, points to the lack of political will and proper structures as the reasons for the National School Feeding Program’s inconsistencies. He says that a lack of funding accountability has led to the program’s failure, and calls for proper data collection and planning, as well as a strong partnership between the federal government, local governments, and other stakeholders.
“We need to rework the system and not go to these schools like people from the city who are Gods going to talk to peasants in the village. I said this because there is always this condescending attitude when they are dealing with people in public schools and it becomes a problem. So there is a need for better synergy and to see them as equal partners in the project and not like people that need salvation.”
Udosen proposes strengthening local government administration as a key solution to the issues surrounding the National School Feeding Program. With a focus on improving the quality of personnel and infrastructure, local governments would have the capacity to successfully manage the program. This is especially important because local governments are closer to the communities they serve, and thus are better positioned to understand and respond to the needs of the people.
“The local governments in this light are the chiefs and council of elders in the community,” he says. “The federal government and other stakeholders need to work with these chiefs and stop looking down on them because they are villagers as this has always been the attitude between these ministers and the communities. These chiefs are the people that are directly involved with these community schools and if the program will be sustained, these chiefs must be involved as partners and let their input be valid.”
Udosen further recommends that the federal and state governments work with local governments to collect data that can inform the planning of the program. He says this would provide a clear and accurate picture of the program’s needs and potential challenges, and help to ensure an effective reimplementation in the future.
School feeding programs across Africa
In Kenya, a variety of models are used to supply meals to schoolchildren. These include partnerships between the state and non-state actors, philanthropic initiatives supported by donor funding, and parents working together to ensure school feeding programs are sustained.
Likewise in Botswana, despite allegations of corruption and mismanagement, the national school feeding program has been running for over 50 years, consistently providing daily meals to over 330,000 children. While the program has faced challenges, it has remained operational.
In some parts of Ethiopia, school enrollment increased by up to 100% between 2010 and 2016. This was attributed in part to the implementation of school feeding programs in the region, which helped to protect children from the effects of drought.
In Côte d’Ivoire, the school feeding program has also led to changes in children’s behavior, including improved hand washing, eating habits, nutrition, and hygiene practices.
Editing Credit
Lead Editor: Zubaida Baba Ibrahim
Chidera Eze is a freelance journalist with bias for solutions journalism, a blockchain content writer and a public relations student.
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