The Home Grown School Meals (HGSM) programme acts as a safety net strategy ‘to increase food supply, improve incomes and reduce hunger and malnutrition’. School Feeding Programmes can help to get children into school and keep them there, thus enhancing enrolments and reducing absenteeism; and once the children are in school, the programmes can contribute to their learning, through avoiding hunger and enhancing cognitive abilities.
The HGSMP has therefore twin objectives which relates to education and agriculture. As school feeding programmes run for a fixed number of days a year and have a pre-determined food basket, they can also provide the opportunity to benefit farmers and producers by generating a structured, sustainable and predictable demand for their products thereby, building the market and the enabling systems around it. This is the concept behind Home Grown School Meals (HGSM), identified by the Millennium Hunger Task Force as a quick win in the fight against poverty and hunger.
Following a severe drought in 1979 that had a negative effect on school enrolment and attendance, the Government of Kenya requested the World Food Programme (WFP) for support to provide a midday meal to pre-primary and primary school children in drought affected Arid and Semi-Arid (ASALS) districts. This led to the School Feeding Programme (SFP) that commenced in 1980. The programme began from a humble beginning with about 240,000 school children and progressively increased to a beneficiary level of about 1.3 million in 2008.
By the year 2008, the beneficiary level under the Regular School Meal Programme had reached 1.3 million school children. But due to the increasing cost of food and associated transport cost, WFP found it difficult to sustain the feeding of the 1.3 million beneficiaries’ children; hence WFP reduced the beneficiary by 42 per cent to 750,000 in 2009.
To ensure long term sustainability of the School Meals Programme there was need to move from externally assisted programmes to a nationally supported programme. As a result the Government started the Home Grown School Meals (HGSM) Programme with 540,000 school children in 1,700 Primary schools that WFP handedover. It further agreed that 50,000 pupils will be offloaded annually from the Regular School Meals Programme to the Home Grown School Meal Programme as part of the transition arrangement.
Currently, the HGSMP targets 2,115 schools with a beneficiary level of 760,895 pre-primary and primary school children in 60 semi arid sub-counties. This is a Government of Kenya (GOK) funded programme where funds are disbursed directly to school accounts. The school community does the procurement of food commodities locally following laid down government regulations and guidelines. The cost is worked out at Ksh10 per child/day. Local purchases reduces the cost related to transport, warehousing and general distribution thereby lowering the cost of the school meals programme thus making it more cost effective and sustainable.
By linking School meals with agricultural development through the purchase of locally produced food, Home Grown School Meals Programme does not only address poor children’s nutrition and education challenges, but also create a consistent and predictable market to small scale farmers, thus promoting local development.
School Meals Programme Coverage in Kenya