THE Presidency on Saturday said 246 million primary schools pupils across 20 states have served meals till date under the National Home Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP).
According to a statement issued in Abuja by Senior Special Assistant on media and publicity in the office of the Vice President, Laolu Akande, the total figure is expected to reach 313,928,420 meals by the last week of February 2018.
It said about six million pupils in 33,981 public primary schools benefitted from the programme.
“More states are expected to be added to the programme this year. The NHGSFP plans to implement feeding in a total of 28 States, while it aims to link farmers to school feeding markets,” it stated.
The Presidency added that under the National Social Investment Programmes (NSIP) of the present administration, about 40,000 direct jobs have been created from the School Feeding Programme.
It listed the 20 states that have so far been covered by the NHGSFP as Anambra, Enugu, Oyo, Osun, Ogun, Ebonyi, Zamfara, Delta, Abia, Benue, Plateau, Bauchi, Taraba, Kaduna, Akwa-Ibom, Cross River, Imo, Jigawa, Niger, and Kano.
According to the statement, in the school feeding programme in 2017, collaborated with the Federal Ministry of Health to deliver an integrated deworming programme for pupils in all public primary schools classes 1 to 6 across 17 states nationwide.
It revealed that the School Feeding programme now has a social media-based quality assurance tracking system, #TrackWithUs, ensuring that required standards for the menu for pupils and meal distribution are adhered to across the states in a transparent manner.
It added: “Similarly, the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) has so far recorded over 280,000 beneficiaries in 21 states, while about 300,000 Government Enterprise Empowerment Programme (GEEP) micro-credit, interest-free loans have been disbursed nationwide.
“In the same vein, in 2017, the N-power scheme, which is targeted at providing jobs for unemployed young graduates, started its physical verification process for the 2017 applicants. In 2018, more beneficiaries are expected to be added to about 200,000 young graduates currently employed under the scheme.”
“A total of N900 billion was appropriated for the SIPs in 2016 and 2017; with N500 billion appropriated for 2016 and N400 billion appropriated for 2017.”
“However, the total amount released was N110 billion for 2016 and 2017, with the total expenditure of N109 billion.
“Below is a breakdown of the N109 billion released between October 2016 and November 2017 for the SIPs, namely: GEEP, CCT, NHGSFP, N-power, and general expenditure.”
“The GEEP expenditure was N11,700,200,466, while the CCT gulped N5,235,401,087.”
“In the same vein, between October 2016 and November 2017, N22,370,719,017 was expended for the Home-grown School Feeding Programme (HGSFP); while N69,731,256,122 was expended on N-power, which is the Job Creation component of the SIP, during the same period.”
