1.7 million school feeding beneficiaries to be registered under NHIS

About 1.7 million beneficiary pupils of the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) are to be registered onto the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) under a joint project by the Ministry of

Gender, Children and Social Protection (GCSP) and the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA).

Under the GSFP, the government provides one hot meal to pupils in 5,000 public schools across the country.

The programme, according to the Minister of GCSP, Nana Oye Lithur, is to ensure that beneficiaries of the GSFP also have access to healthcare services.

“We have had issues with alleged bloating of figures of beneficiary pupils under the GSFP and so the registration exercise would also help us to establish the accuracy of the number of children through the biometric system,” she stated.

Reforms
According to the minister, the pupils would be provided with biometric cards for easy identification.

Nana Oye said the registration exercise would take off in April this year after the training of stakeholders such as teachers, district officers, desk officers and births and deaths officials.

“Since school feeding was handed over to us last year, we have had to do a restructuring to make the programme more effective. We have also had to strengthen monitoring systems,” she stated.

Payment
“When the ministry took over the feeding programme last year, there were some areas to be cleared. We have since done two payments so far. We have paid for the first term, second term and part of third term. We have paid 38 days for the third term, and presently we have 17 days to pay for the rest of the third term for the 2015/2016 academic year,” she indicated.

The minister gave an assurance that the government was in the process of clearing all the arrears within a period of three to four weeks.

She noted that although the school feeding fee had been increased from 50 pesewas per child to 80 pesewas per child, her ministry had sent an application to the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning to increase the figure to GH¢1.20 per child per meal.

The GSFP, which is currently being supported by the World Food Programme, was introduced in 2005.