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

Farmer involvement is problematic

Following the adoption of the HGSF and its subsequent implementation, the educational portfolio of HGSF has made great strides and impact. However, the agricultural component has been lacking. Survey reports from SEND-Ghana and SNV Ghana in 2008 indicated that foodstuff for the Ghana School Feeding Program was not purchased from smallholder farmers within the communities/districts in which the schools were situated.

Smallholder farmers will not automatically benefit from the programme because:

a) Caterers are not under any obligation to purchase their foodstuffs from the smallholders, so they purchase the foodstuffs from the cheapest sources. And because of the liberalized markets in the Sub-Saharan countries, food products such as rice, meat/chicken parts and cooking oil are far cheaper in the open markets.

b) There is no co-ordination and harmonization of the HGSF across different ministries (Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Food and Agriculture). Therefore organizing the farmers and their organizations to take advantage of the programme has become problematic.

c) Purchasing and payments of food produce from the farmers by the caterers are not regular and thus there is little trust between caterers and farmers. While farmers complain of delays in payments, the caterers state that they pre-finance the provision of food and have to take out a loan at high interest rates. While farmers accuse caterers of breaking their promises to purchase from them when there is a glut, caterers fear farmers may sell their produce to others in the event that the open market offers competitive prices. Hence farmers could not be relied upon.

d) The smallholder farmers are not organized into commodity clusters or co-operatives. They as individuals cannot meet the demand in qualities and quantities and prompt supplies for the HGSF.

King-David Amoah, ECASARD, Ghana

Farmers’ benefits from HGSF programmes

Despite some risks, Carmen Burbano de Lara believes that government-regulated school feeding programmes sourced from local agricultural production can be worthwhile for small scale farmers. Firstly, because “the aggregate amount of food needed for a national school feeding program represents an important demand for small scale farmers. Their sales to the program can increase their income.” Modeling exercises done by WFP, for example, support this. It estimates that “if the school feeding program in Kenya purchased maize from small scale farmers in high-potential areas, the annual incomes of 175,000 farmers would increase by US$50 per small scale farmer, which is not a small sum in low-income settings.”

Secondly, she believes that local procurement will increase the sustainability of school feeding programmes. In Ecuador for example, she notes, the government effectively took over school feeding programmes from the WFP. “Since the WFP handover in 2004, the Ecuadorian program benefits around 1.3 million children through government funding and management, with a food basket composed entirely of locally produced foods including rice, beans and a locally produced fortified maize-soya blend. Specific actions have been taken to ensure that small farmers can compete in national tenders by: decreasing the size of the tenders; training small farmers in preparation for tenders, cost analysis and storage; and allowing farmers to deliver their products at nearby locations.” The link to local production has increased public support to the program while keeping the cost low.

Despite these possible benefits, Carmen believes that government need to be aware of some potential difficulties of including local farmers, in order to improve the potential for success. To support small-scale farmers, “the agriculture sector at the central and local levels needs to be involved at all stages of program development and implementation”. In addition, governments need to ensure stable funding for the school feeding programme to minimalise affecting the stability of market linkages. Thirdly, procurement at a school level can cause difficulties, because decentralized programmes “have trouble making the link with small farmer production because of the reduced scale of their daily or weekly purchases”. Local caterers will “find ways of cutting costs often by buying the cheapest food in the market, which can be imported or of low quality”. Lastly, financial flows and payments are also an issue. “In Ghana, caterers are not immediately reimbursed so they purchase food items on credit. This arrangement is difficult for small scale farmers who cannot afford to wait two to three months to get paid for their produce. One solution to this problem could be to pre-finance the caterers so they are able to sign contracts with farmer associations.”

“In conclusion, school feeding programs that are linked to local production can be a powerful tool to ensure children go to school and are ready to learn, while also providing economic benefits to the household, to small scale farmers and local economies in general. Low income countries which are committed to making school feeding work should be supported by donors, development partners, the private sector and civil society. The potential benefits of school feeding are too big to ignore.”

Accounting for school feeding

If there is any era in humanity where the demand for accountability is high, then that era is now. There is a worldwide call for a results-based approach to development. Development projects are confronted with current social and political upheavals, the media's quest for information and a global demand for wise use of resources. In response to this new context, social accountability becomes an important tool to provide more transparency in development programmes such as the Ghana School Feeding Program (GSFP).

But social accountability is not only a solution to inform the public about development projects. Actors in development programmes are held accountable for their activities towards the project's beneficiaries, donors and internal staff, among others. Holding these actors accountable improves the programme's effectiveness, governance and enhances its credibility.

In its first years of operation, the GSFP was confronted with several administrative and structural deficiencies. Poor coordination, limited understanding of the programme, over-politiziation, and poor financial management were complicated further by an absence of monitoring and evaluation systems and inadequate information to improve decision-making processes. In response to these challenges, the Social Accountability project was born. 

Programmes suffering problems, such as the GSFP did in its initial years, need strengthened management systems, increased access to information, improved collaboration among actors and independent monitoring by civil society organizations. After collecting essential information on the implementation of the programme, SNV-Ghana and 50 local partner development organizations identified supplementary activities needed to make the programme achieve its objectives. The resulting Social Accountability Project was initiated by the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development with support from the Dutch Embassy, SNV-Ghana and SIGN.

As we learnt from the Social Accountability Project, effective accountability calls for developing functional management systems, such as monitoring and evaluation, management information systems, financial management and facilitating multi-stakeholder engagements at both the supply and demand sides. Chaos arose when the GSFP was initiated without these systems in place. The Social Accountability Project has helped to improve the understanding of GSFP among implementing partners, the media and citizens. Currently, civil society organisations are participating in the whole process and their results being accepted by state actors (which is encouraging in a developing country like Ghana). Consequently, the programme can continue and expand with continuing government support.

However, the acceptance of accountability initiatives within programmes depends on the message used to communicate the initiative. In the Social Accountability Project, our message was that social accountability is not about criminalization or catching a thief, but about strengthening systems and institutions that guarantee sustainability in development results. We learnt that this effective packaging of communication messages led key stakeholders in the country to commit to strengthening accountability mechanisms.

We must also not forget the importance of civil society in making social accountability work. Social accountability is aimed at strengthening systems and institution for effective delivery. The technical expertise of civil society organisations helps to improve this delivery by engaging state actors in a fruitful and result-oriented manner.

Paying attention to social accountability can greatly improve programmes such as the GSFP. After its implementation, the programme's coverage increased to over 2000 schools and 973,313 pupils in all the 170 District Assemblies in September 2011. For SNV, the experiences with the social accountability project in GSFP laid a foundation for accountability initiatives in programmes in other countries. Considering the results achieved, I recommend that the principles of Social Accountability should be mainstreamed in all programmes to promote partnership, ownership, collaboration and transparent and effective communication.

Written by: Sarah Agbey Dedei (SNV-Ghana)