After being stopped in March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the National Homegrown School Feeding Program was reinstated in Kaduna state last Wednesday. Saude Amina Atoyebi, the Kaduna State Focal Person – National Social Investment Programmes, said the feeding program has now been strengthened since the resumption of the program.
“We currently have around 730,000 children in classes 1–3 of our public elementary schools in Kaduna state who are benefiting from the initiative.” Over 7,000 cooks are employed across the state to provide meals for students in over 3,400 schools across the 23 LGAs,” she said. The Focal Person stated that students will benefit from the government’s social safety net, noting that “for many pupils, this is the only quality meal they get to eat on a daily basis.”
Saude stated that the Kaduna State Government has put in place numerous processes and initiatives to improve the school feeding program. “The state government used the period of school closures to develop accountability groups of mothers in several schools, which is known as the Kaduna Mothers for Accountability (KM4A) Group,” she said, citing the activities of the School Feeding Multi-Sectoral Team.
KM4A, she says, “is a voluntary group of self[1]motivated moms of students in the same school who will work together to hold the cooks accountable and guarantee that the school food program’s quality and standards are maintained.” They’ve been educated to handle small transgressions and escalate more serious matters to the Social Investment Office as needed, thanks to help from the McArthur Foundation, ActionAid Nigeria, and other organizations working in the state.
‘’Many of these mothers have several children in these schools and are vested in seeing that their children benefit optimally from the programme,’’ the State Focal Person added. Saude further said that Kaduna state is collaborating with the Bill Gates Foundation to deepen financial inclusion among the cooks and explore creative ways to improve their financial literacy and business acumen.
“A menu standardization and handy measures training was successfully done by the state government in partnership with Partnership for Child Development (PCD) to ensure that meals prepared met the required reference nutrient intake for our students. “We expect that with the training that has been passed down to all of the state’s cooks, the meals will taste the same and, more significantly, contain the nutrients that our children need to develop and be healthy,” she added.
Ada Peter
