The Executive Director of Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare, is advocating for the management of Ghana’s School Feeding Programme ( GSFP) to be handled by the District Assemblies.
He urged the current administration to scrap the GSFP secretariat and ship everything to the districts.
“Allocate school feeding funds as part of DACF to districts based on the poverty index, and request local governments to leverage with a % of IGF,”
“Allow local governments to own, manage and be accountable for their own school feeding programmes; not people in Accra.” he added.
Asare argues that the centralisation of the GSFP provides an avenue for padding, which he says is the most common fraud in the GSFP.
“Enrollment padding is the commonest fraud in the GSFP, and perhaps the only reason why it is still centralized, yet, no one ever goes to jail,”
“Centralizing data and management in Accra only makes it difficult to verify from that village/school…the fraud is then sustained.” He added.
His comments comes at the back of allegations of fraud made against the GSFP in the previous administration by former Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, Sarah Adwoa Safo.
Asare in a Facebook post dated March 21,2025, alleged in line with the former minister’s position that corruption has plagued the GSFP – a programme meant to provide children in public primary with meals.
“There are more beneficiaries on paper than in schools. The real beneficiaries are living somewhere in East Legon, cooking figures in the name of some village school.” he claimed.
Further, he added that his organisation has on several occasions inquired about the list of beneficiaries on the programme from the GSFP but to no avail.
“Between 2020 and 2023, none of Eduwatch’s requests for beneficiary data under GSFP was honoured. Everything is a secret over there.” He asserted.
The school feeding programme, he said, is the second largest government investment in schools after the FSHS policy, receiving almost half the size of the free SHS budget; this year, the government has budgeted GHC 1.4 billion for its implementation.
Mike 105.3 FM | Navrongo | Alexander Bombande
