Education Ministry, partners should fund school feeding program

The African Union Special Representative to Liberia, Ambassador Ibrahim M. Kamara says in most countries, a line ministry, primarily the Ministry of Education and development partners are the principal financing and implementing agencies for school feeling program.He says to keep such program sustainable, it requires stable funding, ideally through national allocation.

The AU Ambassador spoke recently at the Monrovia City Hall during a one-day National Stakeholders Conference on Home-Grown School.He says lack of large-scale structure demand programs and supply-side response to support the expansion of home grown school feeling pose a serious challenge.

The AU envoy underscores a need to investing in the agriculture sector to boost production and meet additional demand for school children.He also points to low application of monitoring and evaluating for school feeling programs on a national scale with limited usage of automated feeling, system to contribute to policy making.
He says while the home-grown school feeling initiative is taking shape as a new development approach in Liberia, it is critically important that a robust management information system is in place to support evidence-based policy development.

“Education-based objective and indicators remain the most common means for measuring outcomes from school feeling program in AU member states, with little integration for cross- sectorial indicators and objectives.”

Amb. Kamara continues that this implies the need for a robust integration of other sectorial indicators for nutrition and agriculture evidence under Home-Grown School Feeding.

He discloses that generally, a cross-sectorial coordination and integration school feeling into national development plans and agendas are still at nascent levels of uptake, but says yet, country ownership is critical for sustaining school feeling program to the national development agenda.

-Editing by Jonathan Browne