Perception of parents on the nutritional relevance of school feeding programme in Nigeria

Abstract

The Home-Grown School Feeding Program (HGSFP) was deemed a truly nutritious and educationally beneficial initiative upon its reintroduction. It was commendable considering the unstable state of the economy and the substandard domestic living conditions brought on by multifaceted poverty. To increase the nutritious intake of at least 2.5 million school-age children, the HGSFP set out to serve a meal a day in 2004. The targeted group at the time made up roughly 10% of all elementary school students. Perhaps not enough consideration has been given to whether the program's sustainability and implementation strategy are appropriate for achieving the program's two main goals of raising students' nutritious intake and learning outcomes. Therefore, it became imperative to ascertain the degree to which respondents believed the school feeding program had improved students' nutritional status in basic schools and to investigate the degree to which parents believed the program had improved students' academic performance. While adopting the survey research design the respondents were drawn from among parents randomly selected and served with a structured questionnaire. Findings indicated that inherent challenges with the manner of implementation have made the HGSFP not serve the envisaged purpose of enhancing pupils’ nutrition and learning. It was recommended that the government should ensure proper implementation of HGSFP to enable the essence of the program which has to do with qualitative nutrition and academic outcomes to be continually achieved.