- INTRODUCTION
On Thursday 20th August 2020, the Agric Director, The Nutritional Officer, the Health Directorate, the SHEP Coordinator, the Director of GES and the Desk Officer for school feeding of the New Juaben North Municipal Assembly had on a-day training for careers within the Municipality on the Government directives to provide one hot nutritious meal for Junior High School in the Municipality.
As a result of the above directive, caterers of the GSFP within the New Juaben North Municipality were invited to take note and provide one hot meal to each student at a cost of GHȼ3.50p per student/ teacher for the period, Monday 24th August 2020 to Friday 18th September 2020.
MEETING
During the training it was noted that the Ghana school feeding program was piloted project to provide food to children at the various schools in the country and over the implementation the basic idea of the program has been to provide children in public primary schools and kindergartens with hot nutritious meal prepared from locally grown foodstuffs on every school going day until the directives was brought to notice.
The Nutritionist of the Ghana school feeding outlined the importance of feeding the children with healthy diets, they said adequate nutrition during infancy and early childhood is essential to ensure the growth, health and development of children to their full potentials therefore caterers were to ensure that children get the necessary nutrient when they are being fed in schools.
The Health Director also indicated that inappropriate nutrition can also lead to childhood obesity which was an increasing public health problem in many countries and in order to curb this problem it was necessary to train the caterers to make sure that the meal being prepared by them contains the necessary nutrients.
The Director of the GES based on the issues identified from the Caterers, urged them to have confidence in the GSFP and advised all heads, caterers and other stakeholders of the schools to make the children’s health needs a priority to bring out healthy children.
The Agric Director urged the Desk Officer of the GSFP that any caterers who fail to adhere to the advice given by the facilitators should be invited and cautioned by Management of the Assembly in order to improve upon the conduct of the caterers. He said further that Caterers should continue managing their resources judiciously and ensure the successful implementation of the School Feeding Programme.
Incompletion it was indicated that majority of the caterers end up quitting the school feeding with the perception of no profits on the program, which it was addressed that the school feeding program is a business which needs to be keeping records of the inflow and outflow of the purchases they do. Cash book was recommended to help caterers used to know their profit and loss.
CONCLUSION
The workshop accorded the caterers the opportunity to abreast themselves with issues related to the implementation of the one hot meal of the School Feeding Programme and were grateful to Management of the Assembly for the support.
It is hope that the Assembly would continue to support the programme for successful implementation in the Municipality.
Freda Appiah-Kubi
Desk Officer
Ghana School Feeding