Ghana Archives - World Food Program USA

Accra – The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has provided the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) with tablets to digitize the monitoring of the school feeding program. The initiative aims to reinforce program efficiency and implementation by enabling real-time tracking of daily attendance and feeding in 260 pilot schools in all 16 regions of the country.

“Real-time data on school attendance and feeding is key to enabling efficient management of the program and its expansion to reach more school children in the country,” said Anna Mukiibi-Bunnya, U.N. World Food Programme Representative ad interim and Officer-in-Charge. “These tablets will enhance the monitoring and reporting capacity of the Ghana School Feeding Programme for better results” she added.

Overall, 300 tablets loaded with Tableau and ONA softwares will provide users with visuals to help them see and understand the data, transforming the way they use it to solve problems and providing real -time information for prompt decision-making. In addition to providing the tablets and purchasing the software and server, the U.N. World Food Programme will train 300 people including Headteachers, Circuit Supervisors, caterers and decision-makers at the Ghana School Feeding Programme and the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, to use the tablets for data collection and reporting.

Since the U.N. World Food Programme stopped direct provision of school meals in 2016, it has been providing technical support and helping to improve the overall implementation of the school feeding program which currently reaches over 3.4 million school children in Ghana. The U.N. World Food Programme supports GSFP to train caterers and cooks to be innovative in providing nutritious meals. The food assistance agency is supporting the development of the school feeding bill and the Home-Grown School Feeding Programme Regional Guidelines, in collaboration with NEPAD-African Union Development Agency. Other areas of support are joint-monitoring of the school feeding program and the development of the Cost-Benefit Analysis of School Feeding in Ghana.

Globally, the U.N. World Food Programme has six decades of experience supporting school feeding and health initiatives and working with more than 100 countries to set up sustainable national school feeding programs. Its mission is to ensure that all school aged children have access to school meals and are healthy and ready to learn.

In 2020, the U.N. World Food Programme worked with governments to build capacity, helping to bolster national school feeding programs of 65 countries, benefitting 39 million children. Some 15 million schoolchildren also received nutritious meals and snacks from the U.N. World Food Programme.

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The United Nations World Food Programme is the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. We are the world’s largest humanitarian organization, saving lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to peace, stability and prosperity for people recovering from conflict, disasters and the impact of climate change.

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Comfort Kissiwaa is a Ghanaian mother of five, wife, farmer—and now the manager of a community bank and champion of her community’s development—thanks to her participation in The Hunger Project’s local ownership initiatives. With a small loan and women’s empowerment training, Comfort was able to expand her farming business and increase her annual income from $110 to more than $750, a 600% increase.

This growth transformed her family’s circumstances and her sense of accomplishment. Comfort’s family went from barely being able to afford food every day to consistently being assured daily meals, a home to live in, access to medicine and education for her children. Her success embodies the principles and advantages of local ownership—an approach tointernational development that recognizes its efficacy, particularly for food security.

Local ownership is a strategy for development that puts control in the hands of the community to define their own goals, allocate resources and implement their own programs.

This strategy is based on the recognition that development cannot be imposed—the best kind of development starts within a community. Small loans, technical training or education—all forms of local ownership that organizations such as the Hunger Project and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) have started to utilize—give people access to the skills, resources and knowledge necessary to grow, while also ensuring that they maintain the power and responsibility to identify their goals, decide how the skills and resources are applied, be the agent of their own change and even assess their own success.

The virtue of these local ownership programs can be found in their record of sustainability and efficiency. They capitalize on people’s innate entrepreneurial spirit so they continue to utilize the resources and skills provided.

Rather than relying on an NGO or the government to provide her family with food, education or healthcare, Comfort leveraged the skills and funds provided to transform her subsistence farm into a small business and maintained that business to continue providing for her and her family.

This strategy is especially important when trying to expand food security. Hunger can be alleviated by providing direct food aid, but local ownership programs can create consistent access to food so that aid is no longer necessary.

By providing training to expand agricultural production, help develop productive skills or provide a small loan, local ownership programs can create a reliable income to ensure food will be affordable. WFP, for example, has tapped into this power of local ownership through many of its programs, including food-for-work, food for training, and empowerment of small farmers through its Purchase for Progress initiative.

As Comfort’s story demonstrates, local solutions have the power to not only improve food security efficiently, but also to create exponential momentum for development in a number of directions such as health, gender equality, and education.

With Comfort’s capable hands tending to the growth of her community, local ownership programs are moving us closer to a day when food aid is no longer necessary.