The wife of the Governor of Abia, Mrs Nkechi Ikpeazu, has urged the Federal Government to extend the Home Grown School Feeding Programme to pupils in classes four, five and six.
Ikpeazu made the call during an event on ‘Girl Child Marriage and Gender Inequality in Nigeria’ at the 62nd UN Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York.
The Home Grown School Feeding programme, launched in June 2016 by Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, aims to provide nutritious hot meal a day to over 24 million primary school children.
The national programme, which commenced in October 2016, provides a hot meal – lunch – a day for primary 1 to 3 pupils in public primary schools.#
The wife of the governor said Abia piloted the programme in the current democratic dispensation before the Federal Government commenced programme.
She explained that such gesture would reduce the vulnerability of the girl-child to early marriage and also help improve the enrolment of the girl-child in schools.
Ikpeazu said: “In Abia, we started feeding children in the primary schools before the Federal Government came to feed primary one to three.
“We started the pilot scheme before the Federal Government came and started the free school feeding programme for primary one to three.
“But in Abia, we have gone a step further to feed primary four to six in all the state government-owned schools”.
She said the scheme had increased school enrolment and completion adding, the primary school dropout rate has drastically reduced.
The wife of the Abia governor added that the scheme had improved child nutrition and health.
According to her, it has also strengthened local agricultural economies by providing a school feeding market in which farmers can sell their produce as well as create employment opportunities.
“Through the Abia school feeding programme, we have employed more than 2,000 rural women who must be from the community where the schools are situated before they were employed.
“So we have recruited more than 2,000 women as food vendors, who are cooking for the children in the rural areas.
“These food vendors are put in clusters so that we can supply them with the food for primary four to six,” she said.
She also said that the state was empowering the women in small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
According to her, the Abia people are very interested in SMEs and the state government is promoting ‘Made-in-Aba’ products.
“So in each of the state government’s programmes, it makes sure the women are included.
“The last batch of SMEs that went to China to learn how to make shoes, included many women and they are back,” she said.
NAN reports that the federal government on March 20, 2016 launched the strategic implementation plan for the national home-grown school feeding programme.
The programme, expected to provide a “nutritious hot meal” per day to over 20 million primary school pupils when fully operational, is one of the N500 billion social investment projects of the present administration.
Acting President Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, who launched the programme at a stakeholders’ forum held at State House in Abuja, said about 5.5 million Nigerians would benefit from it in the first year.
He said the scheme would create the multiplier effect on the local economies in communities where those schools were located by boosting agriculture, entrepreneurship and employment.
Osinbajo said the strategic plan set out the partnership arrangement on how the federal, state and local governments would collaborate towards achieving the primary objectives of the school feeding programme. (NAN)
