By Laolu Akande, Special Advisor to the Vice President of Nigeria, Abimbola Adesanmi, Nigeria Country Manager, Partnership for Child Development and the National Coordinator, Nigeria School Meals Program, and Francis Peel, Senior Communications Manager, Partnership for Child Development.
In his 2016 budget speech, President Muhammadu Buhari was clear that his administration will record historic milestones for the development of the nation. One of the ways he aims to achieve this is through an ambitious social investment plan which has at its heart a national Home Grown School Feeding (HGSF) program that will serve children at all public primary schools throughout Nigeria.
HGSF programs provide free school meals procured from local farmers. When designed and implemented correctly, they offer a ‘win-win-win’ for children, farmers, and communities alike. Children benefit from hot, nutritionally balanced school meals which reduce hunger and improve education outcomes; farmers benefit from improved access to school feeding markets and communities benefit from new catering, processing, and food handling jobs. It brings a multiplier effect and is a spur on the economy.
The issues that the HGSF program is designed to tackle are substantial. Analysis conducted by the World Bank identifies Nigeria as having the third largest population of chronically undernourished children in the world. The effects of this scale of malnutrition can be seen in the high levels of child deaths (157 out of every 1000 children born will die before they reach the age of 5) and childhood stunting (37 percent of under-fives are smaller than they should be).
For those malnourished children that survive, there are long-lasting health and educational consequences. Malnourished children are likely to have lower IQs and are less likely to enroll in school, and those that do enroll will miss more school days and are less likely graduate than their healthy well-fed counterparts. Nigeria has over 10 million out-of-school children—the world’s highest number. Malnourished and under-educated children later on in life will earn less and be less productive than if they had been provided with the education and diet that they needed when growing up.
It is perhaps not surprising that rates of stunting—a good measure of malnutrition and out of school children are highest in the poorest parts of the country. But this burden is shouldered by all Nigerians not just the poor. The Nigeria economy loses somewhere between N2200 billion and N3300 billion in lost revenue due to the effects of lower wages, reduced physical and mental capabilities, and reduced work efficiency brought on by the long term effects of malnutrition.
To tackle this problem, President Buhari has asked the Office of the Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, to oversee a whole range of social investment plans including the Home Grown School Feeding. Those plans have been allocated an unprecedented half a trillion Naira in the 2016 Budget proposals now before the National Assembly ($2.4 billion). Other plans include the Conditional Cash Transfers for one million vulnerable and extremely poor Nigerians, youth employment schemes and a micro-credit scheme that will deliver needed but otherwise hard-to-get capital to one million market-women, traders, and artisans via soft and affordable loans.
Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, is very clear “not only will the Home Grown School Feeding programme help our pupils become better students; it will also boost the local economies, and create new jobs along the way.”
Whilst critics might question whether Nigeria can afford spend the $1.68 billion needed to feed all its primary school children, research into school feeding programs around the world found that for every $1 invested in school feeding, between $7 and $16 can be expected in return. Given this the potential economic return from this investment is estimated to between $ 11.8 to 26.8 billion.
One State which is already reaping the rewards of an effective and sustainable HGSF program is Osun State. Known locally as the O’meals, Osun’s programme serves over 250,000 hot, nutritious and locally sourced meals every school day. Since the start of the programme primary school enrollments have increased by 28%, providing Osun with the highest enrollment rate in the country. The local economy has benefited with over 3,000 new jobs created in the school feeding supply chain and 2,000 poultry farmers, 2,000 fish farmers, and 2,000 cocoa-yam farmers selling to the O’Meals Programme. In 2015, an independent report by the Oxford Poverty and Development Initiative rated Osun State as having the 2nd lowest poverty index in Nigeria after Lagos State.
With technical support from Imperial College London’s Partnership for Child Development, and housed within the Vice-President’s office, the Federal Government is now working with other states to design and implement their own programs. As an initial step, six states, one from each geopolitical zone, have been selected for the first wave school feeding programmes. One of the first states to provide meals under this new initiative is Kaduna State which on January 12 successfully started feeding its 1.8 million state primary school students.
Dr. Lesley Drake from the Partnership for Child Development (PCD) said, “The evidence from around the world is that, when correctly implemented, school feeding programmes have the potential to improve the health, nutrition and educational outcomes of children as well as strengthening local agricultural economies. PCD is honored to have the opportunity to support the Government’s work to scale up school feeding in Nigeria.”
When the health and wealth of Nigeria's next generation are at stake, it becomes less a question of whether Nigeria can afford to feed its school children, and more a question of whether it can afford not to.
Find out more at www.hgsf-global.org or on twitter @HGSFglobal.