A real experience with community-led home grown school feeding

The analysis provided by King-David Amoah highlights many of the issues in administering and institutionalising this program. The choice of which food to purchase should be more in the hands of the community. This works very well in the school feeding programme implemented by the NGO PAMBE-Ghana. In PAMBE’s approach, parents and the communities of the schoolchildren provide food based on the local crops they grow. PAMBE provides additional foodstuffs which are not produced by the villages around the school, such as rice and ingredients such as dried fish and cooking oil. These are bought on the closest local market and are produced (mostly) by other farming/fishing communities in Ghana.

Compared to the government implemented school feeding programme, this is a much more community-led and -managed approach to a school feeding program. PAMBE has created an enabling environment where parents discuss, reach consensus and take responsibility for the implementation of their collective decisions in matters that concern the school. In consultation with the school, parents decide on the type and amount of food to contribute per child, and rules and regulations governing collection.

The benefits of this model, in comparison to models where agreements are made with small-scale farmers outside of the community, are:

• The parents/communities don’t have to adapt their products to the demands of the school: they decide what they contribute based on local crops grown;
• The food reflects local or familiar foods, taking nutrition into account;
• There is an accountability mechanism; if parents do not provide the amount of food required, pressure is exerted by the community;
• The decentralised management and local scale (to the catchment area of the school) reduces dependency on other actors for transport, administration, etc.
• Involvement of the school community ensures more sustainability because it benefits their own children, cost-effectiveness is increased and the positive experience enhances their confidence and capacities.

This modest but interesting experience may have wider applicability in rural areas, although it might be difficult to adapt it to a larger scale. With larger schools, it may be more efficient to purchase from several large scale farmers, or from local markets. Also, where public schools or a feeding programme exist, parents may be highly reluctant to provide food if they think the government has the obligation to do so. So, if the government continues to cover the costs of a school lunch, what could be adapted from this experience is that of parental and community involvement in the management. This approach is a real partnership between the community and the NGO, where the people take ownership of the process of providing their children a decent lunch.

Alice Azumi Iddi-Gubbels and Peter Gubbels