The Federal Government on Thursday kicked off its home-grown school feeding programme in Anambra State by “directly” releasing N53, 687, 900 to the cooks.
The Senior Special Assistant to the Vice President on Media and Publicity, Mr Laolu Akande, disclosed this in a statement today, saying the programme would last till the end of the current school term.
The vice president’s spokesman said 76,690 primary 1 to 3 pupils in 1,050 schools in Anambra State would be fed with the money.
He stressed that the cooks were verified and trained to provide the catering service in the 21 local government areas of the state.
According to Akande, the cooks were recruited from communities around the schools.
He stated: “The home-grown school feeding programme, which is one of the social investment plans of the Buhari Presidency, is driven through community participation where residents in the community are engaged as cooks to provide feeding services.”
He said while the 2016 budget provided for the programme’s funding in 18 states, a total of 17 states had concluded the designing of the feeding models through state-level multi-sectoral capacity building workshops based on the Federal Government’s stipulated requirements.
“The 17 states are Anambra, Akwa Ibom, Ebonyi, Enugu, Sokoto, Kaduna, Borno, Zamfara, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Benue, Plateau, Taraba, Delta, Abia and Bauchi. Estimated figures from 15 of these states put the numbers of pupils to be feed at over 3.4 million,” he said.
Akande also stated that the Federal Government had successfully conducted food safety and hygiene training for over 25,000 cooks in 9 states.
