ACTING President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, on Thursday, presided over a meeting of stakeholders to review the strategic plan for the implementation of the national home grown school feeding programme.
The programme is expected to provide a nutritious hot meal a day to over 24 million primary school children when fully operational.
Declaring open the meeting at the Conference Hall of the Presidential Villa, Abuja, he reiterated that the programme would affect about 5.5 million Nigerians in the first year of its operation.
The programme is part of the N500 billion Social Investment being planned for implementation by the present administration.
Osinbajo explained that the strategy set out how the federal, state and local governments were to work together to deliver the primary objectives of the programme, namely, the feeding of the children in the primary schools with healthy nutritious meals prepared from local agricultural produce, cooked and served by food vendors and cooked in the local communities where the schools are located.
He said the ultimate objectives were to bring real change to the lives of 20 million children, creating the multiplier effect on local economies in communities where the schools were located by boosting agriculture, entrepreneurship and employment.
Osinbajo emphasised that the programme’s main benefits included improving school enrollment and completion, curbing the current dropout rates from primary schools, as well as improving child nutrition and health.
He added: “As a result of poverty, many children have poor nutrition and worrying health status.
It will also increase local agricultural production and provide structural demand for agricultural produce and thus create local economies that have a ready-made market for their produce and guarantee profit.
“It will also create jobs that will lift families over the poverty line into the brighter future.
“The stategy plan will only work if there is cooperation between the federal, state and local governments.
“These plans must have specific community implications. It is called home grown feeding for the reason that it must be owned by the people for whom it has been designed.”
The vice-president noted that Federal Government had taken the responsibility to provide the part funding and also secure sound technical support.
Launching the “Global School Feeding Source Book,” Osinbajo said the book launch underscored the fact that “our school feeding programme actually launches us into one into a national school feeding ecosystem with all the benefits of synergy and collaboration that blends.”
In his remark on the occasion, Governor Abiola Ajimobi of Oyo State described the school feeding initiative as the best programme under the present dispensation.
His Osun and Kaduna states counterparts, Rauf Aregbesola and Nasir el-Rufai, respectively, made presentations on their states’ experiences with similar school feeding programme.
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