5.22m pupils in school feeding programme net – Presidency

In line with President Muhammadu Buhari administration’s inclusive growth plan to tackle poverty and hunger by creating jobs, no fewer than 5.226 million pupils are now being fed under the Federal Government’s National Home-Grown School Feeding (NHGSF) Programme. The pupils are spread in 28,249 schools across 19 states, the Presidency said in statement by the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Office of the Vice President, Laolu Akande. According to the statement, over 50,000 cooks are presently engaged across the beneficiary states of Anambra, Enugu, Oyo, Osun, Ogun, Ebonyi, Zamfara, Delta, Abia, Benue, Plateau, Bauchi, Taraba, Kaduna, Akwa Ibom, Cross River, Imo, Jigawa and Niger. In continuation of the programme’s reach pupils in schools in Kano and Kaduna will be incorporated in the coming weeks to meet the target of feeding 5.5 million schoolchildren by the end of 2017. Expected to significantly boost the nation’s agricultural sector, the statement noted that the programme is part of the Buhari administration’s N500 billion National Social Investment Programme (NSIP). In related development, the programme is collaborating with the Ministry of Health to deliver an integrated deworming exercise for pupils in classes 1 to 6 across in all public primary schools across 17 states presently under the NHGSFP. No fewer that 243 local councils are expected to benefit from the exercise in the 17 states from the first week of December. The states include Abia, Akwa Ibom, Enugu, Niger, Osun, Bauchi, Jigawa, Katsina, Zamfara, Anambra, Benue, Imo, Kano, Kaduna, Ebonyi, Delta and Plateau. According to the statement, the integrated programme “will deliver three different drugs for the treatment of diseases endemic to specific states, particularly schistosomiasis, soil-transmitted helminthes, and river blindness/onchocerciasis. The drugs to be distributed are Albendazole, Ivermectin and Parazaquintel.”