By Chimezie Godfrey
The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Hajiya Sadiya Farouq, says 8.6 million pupils have so far benefitted from the National Home Grown Feeding Programme across the Federation.
She stated this at the inauguration of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) National Home Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP), held at the LEA Primary School, Karu, Abuja.
According to her, “NHGSFP is currently benefitting over 8.6 million pupils in over 56,000 public primary schools in 35 States across Nigeria.
“About 107,670 cooks have been empowered and over 200,000 small farmers linked to the Programme by supplying locally sourced ingredients to improve the nutrition and quality of meals for the children.
“In the FCT alone, 73,000 pupils are being fed in 402 schools by 796 women” the Minister explained,” she said.
Farouq added that, as one of the four Social Investment Programmes, NHGSFP is focused on ensuring one nutritious balanced meal each day to pupils in classes 1 to 3 in Public Primary Schools across the country.
“The Programme is designed to increase enrolment rates by mopping up the huge numbers of out of school children in Nigeria while tackling school age malnutrition.
“The Ministry is committed to ensuring that the strategic objectives of all the social intervention programmes are achieved and it has as one of its mandates is the formulation and implementation of fair focused social inclusion and protection programmes in Nigeria”, she added.
The Social Investment, currently domiciled in the Ministry was designed to achieve the national objectives of poverty eradication reduction, increase resilience promote equity and stimulate growth.
Also speaking, the Minister of State, Federal Capital Territory, Dr. Ramatu Tijjani Aliyu said that “the NHGSFP is targeted at improving the health and education outcome of Primary School Pupils, especially the brain development of the school children from the scratch, for when the brain is fully developed, the nation can be well secured”, according to President Muhammadu Buhari directive.
