The National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme has been increased from N70 to N100 per meal for schoolchildren in Delta State.
Dr Darlington Ijeh, the state Commissioner for Humanitarian and Community Support Services, expressed his displeasure with the way the caterers were treated in Asaba.
Ijeh, who was sworn in as a commissioner by Governor Ifeanyi Okowa in August 2022, promised to monitor the Federal Government’s programmes for the benefit of the people of the state.
He said, “Upon my assumption in office three months ago, I inherited a backlog of issues on the NHGSFP that ranged from inconsistent payment to underpayment, low capturing leading to low figures for cooks, which adversely impacted our pupils and the state.
“Today, the N70 per meal for school pupils has been reviewed to N100 per meal, and other bureaucratic bottlenecks that had bedevilled the National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme in the state, such as short payment of caterers and indiscriminate payment modules, became a thing of the past.”
The commissioner, who distributed cooking utensils to cooks, appealed to the caterers to make good morality their guiding principle in the discharge of their duties.
He said the school feeding programme was designed to feed pupils from primary 1 to 3 in public schools, adding that the aim was to encourage more school enrolment as well as improve the nutritional meals of the pupils.