Participants at a stakeholder meeting on the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) have called for a closer collaboration between the programme and its functionaries to make it more efficient.
They said the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA), Ghana Education Service (GES) and the Municipal and District Assemblies should collaborate to elect a coordinator, who would link all their activities together under the Programme.
The participants said GSFP needed a strong political will and appealed to the Regional Coordinating Council to ensure that certain steps that would enhance the Programme were taken.
The meeting was to identify challenges of institutional collaboration and assess the state of complementary services in the GSFP.
Presenting the findings of a study carried out last year in the Northern, Upper East, Upper West and Greater Accra Regions Mr Jeremiah .A. Atengdem, Programme Officer of the Social Enterprise Development Foundation (SEND) Ghana, said several challenges were identified under the programme.
He said about 43 per cent of beneficiary schools does not have access to safe drinking water while 37 per cent of the water tanks supplied to 83 per cent of schools under the feeding programme were not in use.
He said 61 per cent of beneficiary schools did not have good kitchen structures and 78 per cent did not have adequate stocks of kitchen ware, especially plates and cups, he said.
The study, Mr Atengdem said found out that 26 per cent of beneficiary schools did not have toilet facilities, while 87 per cent lacked hand washing facilities.
About 70 per cent of the schools did not have enough class rooms to shelter all classes and about 61 per cent had inadequate furniture.
Other findings include resource constraints, lack of priority treatment of needs of schools by the Municipal and District Assemblies, centralized planning, and poor community awareness of the programme.
Mr Atengdem said some of the cooks had not undergone training in nutrition and hygiene while about 91 per cent of the schools bought their food stuff from the open market instead of buying directly from farmers in the communities concerned.
Mrs Lucy Awuni, Upper East Deputy Regional Minister, noted that the GSFP was implemented in a rush and therefore needed more time for proper restructuring.
She said some of the schools had families and the teachers running the feeding programme, which was not good enough and called for experts to be employed to handle the cooking.
"The Programme is good for our children and we adults should not be stumbling block to it", she added.
She noted that poverty alleviation was the topmost priority of the Regional Coordinating Council and it would do its best to ensure the successful implementation of the GSFP, which is aimed at improving the nutritional and education status of children.
The GSFP, which started in 2005, aimed at reducing poverty and improving food security. It has a target of 1.04 million school children by 2010.
Currently the Programme feeds about 595,000 children in public schools nationwide and a total of GH¢65.7 million have so far been spent in its implementation.