The National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme has been reviewed from N70 per meal for schoolchildren to N100 in Delta State.
The state Commissioner for Humanitarian and Community Support Services, Dr Darlington Ijeh, who stated this in Asaba, frowned on the manner in which the caterers were shortchanged.
Ijeh, who was sworn in by Governor Ifeanyi Okowa as a commissioner on August 2022, vowed to monitor the Federal Government’s programmes for the betterment of the people of the state.
He said, “Upon my assumption in office three months ago, I inherited a backlog of issues on the NHGSFP that ranged from inconsistent payment to underpayment, low capturing leading to low figures for cooks, which adversely impacted our pupils and the state.
Today, the N70 per meal for school pupils has been reviewed to N100 per meal, and other bureaucratic bottlenecks that had bedevilled the National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme in the state, such as short payment of caterers and indiscriminate payment modules, became a thing of the past.”
The commissioner, who distributed cooking utensils to cooks, appealed to the caterers to make good morality their guiding principle in the discharge of their duties.
He said the school feeding programme was designed to feed pupils from primary 1 to 3 in public schools, adding that the aim was to encourage more school enrolment as well as improve the nutritional meals of the pupils.