The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Hajiya Sadiya Farouq has engaged 1,000 cooks targeting over 500,000 public primary and Tsangaya Pupils into the national home-grown feeding (NH-GF) programme in Borno state.
The feeding programme is being implemented under multi-faceted interventions to scale up school enrolments and nutrition of pupils of primary I to III classes.
While enumerating the beneficiaries for feeding Wednesday in Maiduguri, Farouq disclosed: “The feeding programme in schools will support local production of food, job creation and income generation and to increase the number of enrolment, especially in the state which has been ravaged by over a decade insurgency.”
The Minister, who was represented by Director in the Ministry, Ali Grema, said that feeding in schools will also provide nutritious meals to pupils in primary schools.
Already, he said over nine million pupils benefited from the free meal per day during school terms across the country.
On how to sustain the feeding programme, he said: “The NH-GF programme could enhance socioeconomic development,” adding that it needs to be scaled up and sustained in Nigeria.
He, therefore, urged the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) and education boards to verify the existing numbers of beneficiaries of the programme.
“I also encourage all of us to do more to ensure that children benefit from the free meals in schools,” he said.
The Consultant of the feed programme, Mohammed Alfa while disclosing the modalities said that 1,000 cooks are to be engaged and captured biometrically in Borno state.
He said that it is unfortunate that in the past, only 120,000 pupils were enrolled for the feeding programme across the state, insisting that, the new scale-up is targeting over 500,000 pupils with the full support of traditional rulers, religious leaders, teachers and other stakeholders.
He noted that the Tsangaya school children are also to be captured biometrically along with other pupils.
Alfa urged traditional rulers, teachers and parents to cooperate with the successful implementation of the feeding programme.
Governor Babagana Zulum said that education is the topmost priority of the state government.
Zulum, who was represented by the Chief of Staff, Prof. Isa Marte added that the programme should be upgraded and sustained to achieve the objectives of the feeding programme.
In her welcome address, the Focal Person of the National Social Investment Programme, NSIP, Hajiya Aisha Waziri said, the essence of the meeting is to have a stakeholders engagement and the objective of scaling up the school feeding programme in the state.
She noted that “when the programme started some years back, Borno state was in the height of the insurgency, and due to the insurgency, where most schools were shut down, we were unable to register pupils as many like other states, so the purpose of this occasion is to have a new scale-up in order to register more pupils into the programme”.
Waziri also said that there were quite a number of National Youth Service Corps, NYSC within the audience that are trained and would be deployed to various parts of the state for the enumeration exercise using the systems that have already been configured for the biometric data capture of the pupils.
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