MANAGEMENT OF THE GHANA SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMME IN THE WA MUNICIPALITY OF GHANA

Abstract

The importance of education in developing a country's human resources has been explicitly affirmed in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The challenge of the inability of some segments of the population to access affordable quality education especially at the basic level has led governments, including Ghana, to implement school feeding programmes as part of broad social protection measures. Whilst documented evidence suggests how successful school feeding programmes have been, concerns about the need to align programme operations and implementation to established guidelines and procedures and possibly review some of them have not resulted in focused research in this direction. In light of Ghana's School Feeding Programme (GSFP), this study looked at the management of the initiative in Wa Municipality by comparing and evaluating the programme design arrangements with what happens in practice. Using mixed methods of semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, participant observation and document analysis, primary and secondary data were collected and analyzed from the local programme management and implementation actors as identified by the GSFP operations manual. The study shows that weak communication mechanisms are pervasive as formal reporting is inadequate and information-sharing deficient; inadequacy in the institutional arrangement at the school level to strengthen the framework for ensuring compliance to duties and monitoring of activities; whilst weak inter-sector partnerships exist among the decentralized agencies of agriculture, education and health within the Wa Municipality. Given that community sensitization has been inadequate, community participation in the management of the school feeding is very limited thus raising ownership, voice and accountability concerns in the context of decentralization. The study recommends among other things that actors and SICs in particular be adequately trained on their respective duties at least a year before a programme is introduced in a school with the membership of the SIC reconstituted to include the caterers. Within the context of new public management thinking, the feeding of pupils could be outsourced to private firms to secure standardized meal quality and quantity, assist with data gathering and reporting whilst credible CSOs / NGOs could be engaged on performance-contract basis to undertake the schedule of the district GSFP desk officer.