School Feeding Programme: Over 3 million children are fed everyday - Gender Minister discloses

Gender, Children and Social Protection Minister, Lariba Zuweira Abudu has disclosed that over 3 million school children are fed daily under the government's school feeding programme.

The Minister, calming the nerves of the caterers under the programme who complain bitterly about delays in paying them, noted that her Ministry is doing everything within its power to accelerate the process; however some of the delays are due to the bureacratic nature of the programme.

"The school feeding payment has a procedure and sometimes it is the procedure that delays payment. When you take the stakeholders, we have Regional, district, communities, schools; we have Headteachers involved, we have assemblies involved and it has to go through all these processes," she said.

Giving clarifications, she stated that currently, the programme covers 10,832 schools with 34,350 caterers cooking to feed these schools.

Also, 3,810,491 school children are given food everyday since the government rolled out the programme.

Taking these numbers into consideration, the Minister asked the caterers to be patient with her stressing she is fully aware of their problems, particularly with reimbursing them, but assures them they will receive their payments.

Hon. Zuweira Abudu made this disclosure during Peace FM's "Kokrokoo" morning show.