The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has provided the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) with tablets to digitize the monitoring of the school feeding programme. The initiative aims to reinforce programme efficiency and implementation by enabling real-time tracking of daily attendance and feeding in 260 pilot schools in all 16 regions of the country.
“The tablets will enhance the monitoring and reporting capacity of the Ghana School Feeding Programme,” said Anna Mukiibi-Bunnya, WFP Representative ad interim and Officer-in-charge. “Actual data on school attendance and feeding is key to enabling efficient management of the programme and its expansion to reach more school children in the country.”
Overall, 300 tablets loaded with Tableau and ONA softwares will provide users with visuals to help them see and understand the data, transforming the way they use it to solve problems and providing real -time information for prompt decision making by the managers of the school feeding programme. In addition to providing the tablets and purchasing the software and server, WFP has also digitized the monitoring questionnaire and uploaded it onto the tablets.
Over three hundred people will be trained to use the tablets to collect data and report. These include Head teachers who will use the tablets to track school attendance on a daily basis, Circuit Supervisors who will monitor the Head teachers and caterers cooking schedules, and decision makers at the Ghana School Feeding Programme and the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection.
Since WFP stopped direct provision of school meals in 2016, it has been providing technical support and helping to improve the overall implementation of the school feeding programme which currently reaches over 3.4 million school children in Ghana. WFP supports GSFP to train caterers and cooks to be innovative in providing nutritious meals. The food assistance agency is supporting the development of the school feeding bill and the Home-Grown School Feeding Programme Regional Guidelines, in collaboration with NEPAD-African Union Development Agency. Other areas of support are joint-monitoring of the school feeding programme and the development of the Cost-Benefit Analysis of School Feeding in Ghana.
Globally, WFP has six decades of experience supporting school feeding and health initiatives and working with more than 100 countries to set up sustainable national school feeding programmes. Its mission is to ensure that all school aged children have access to school meals and are healthy and ready to learn.
In 2020, WFP worked with governments to build capacity, helping to bolster national school feeding programmes of 65 countries, benefitting 39 million children. Some 15 million schoolchildren also received nutritious meals and snacks from WFP.
Source: Publicagendagh.com/ WFP
