The Ghana School Feeding Programme plans to extend its reach to over 1,000 additional pupils in rural public basic schools that currently lack coverage, National Coordinator Hajia Fati Forgor announced Friday, as the initiative continues serving more than four million students across the country.
Speaking at an education stakeholders’ meeting, Hajia Forgor emphasized the government’s commitment to ensuring no child in Ghana’s public school system goes hungry during school hours. The expansion targets communities where basic schools have operated without feeding support despite qualifying under the programme’s criteria.
The announcement comes as Ghana’s school feeding initiative has grown substantially over two decades. Between 2005 and 2023, the programme expanded significantly, reaching over 3.6 million schoolchildren across all 261 districts in Ghana, though current figures suggest enrollment now exceeds four million pupils.
The programme provides children in public primary schools and kindergartens with one hot nutritious meal prepared from locally grown foodstuffs on every school day. This approach simultaneously addresses child nutrition while supporting local farmers and creating employment opportunities for thousands of caterers, predominantly women.
Hajia Fati Forgor assumed office as National Coordinator in March 2025, inheriting a programme facing persistent challenges including funding delays and quality concerns. Her tenure has focused on stabilizing operations while exploring expansion opportunities to underserved areas.
Rural schools often struggle with lower enrollment and higher dropout rates compared to urban institutions, partly because poverty forces children into farm labor or other economic activities. Providing regular meals addresses one key barrier keeping children away from classrooms, particularly in agricultural communities where food insecurity remains prevalent during lean seasons.
The coordinator’s announcement about adding 1,000 pupils appears modest compared to the programme’s overall size, but targeting rural areas reflects strategic thinking about where interventions produce maximum impact. Children in remote communities typically face greater nutritional deficits than urban counterparts, making school feeding programmes particularly valuable in these settings.
Ghana’s school feeding initiative forms part of the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Programme Pillar 3, which seeks to enhance food security and reduce hunger aligned with United Nations Sustainable Development Goals addressing hunger, poverty, and malnutrition. The programme emphasizes spending 80 percent of feeding budgets on locally grown foodstuffs, creating market opportunities for smallholder farmers.
In April, the government settled 31 days of arrears owed to caterers for the first term of the 2024/2025 academic year, addressing long standing complaints about delayed payments that threaten programme sustainability. Caterers often struggled to maintain consistent meal provision while awaiting government reimbursements.
Hajia Forgor previously observed that inadequate monitoring affects food quality under the programme, highlighting implementation challenges beyond just funding. Ensuring caterers follow established menus and nutritional guidelines requires robust supervision across thousands of schools in every district.
The programme has demonstrated positive impacts on school enrollment and retention rates, particularly in underserved communities where children might otherwise skip school due to hunger. However, questions persist about whether meals provided meet the intended standard of supplying 30 percent of children’s daily energy requirements.
Financial sustainability remains the programme’s biggest challenge. Government funding delays create cascading problems affecting caterers’ ability to purchase ingredients and maintain consistent meal provision. These disruptions undermine the programme’s educational benefits, as irregular feeding provides less incentive for families to prioritize school attendance.
The expansion to an additional 1,000 rural pupils will require identifying reliable caterers in remote areas where infrastructure and supply chains may be less developed than in district capitals. Successfully implementing the expansion depends partly on ensuring these new sites receive consistent funding and adequate monitoring from the outset.
Critics have questioned school selection processes in the past, suggesting political considerations sometimes override poverty criteria when determining which institutions receive feeding support. Transparent selection of the newly added rural schools could address these concerns while demonstrating commitment to evidence based expansion.
As Ghana navigates economic pressures affecting public spending, maintaining and expanding the school feeding programme tests the government’s commitment to protecting social investments during fiscal constraints. The coordinator’s announcement signals that expansion continues despite broader budgetary challenges facing the education sector.
