Akufo-Addo announces ‘one day, one free meal’ for BECE students

President Nana Akufo-Addo has announced the government will feed Junior High School students one meal a day as they are camped to write their final year exams.

The students are back in school but with restrictions to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus while they prepare to sit their Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE).

But the president, in his 15^th address to the nation, said he had heard that some of these “hungry” students were struggling to feed themselves as they are no longer with their parents.

In another gesture which he explained was to demonstrate that the government cared, Nana Akufo-Addo said all 584,000 final year students are to expect “one hot meal a day.”

He also included 146,000 staff in school to benefit from the free meal, another of government’s ever-increasing gestures in the fight against coronavirus.

In all 730,000 students and staff are to be fed, in both public and private schools across the country, the president indicated.

The school feeding programme would begin August 24 and end September 18^th, 2020 by which time the final-year students would have finished writing the BECE.

The Gender, Children and Social Protection Ministry are to supervise the school-feeding programme, the president tasked.

Since 2005, the government has already has been implementing the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) for first-cycle public schools.

It was to encourage enrollment, attendance and retention of students in government-run basic and primary schools.

Currently, beneficiary pupils of are over 2, 600, 000 in about 9000 school in all the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs), according to the GSFP.