The impact of school feeding program on educational outcomes in the Ejisu Juaben district of the Ashanti region of Ghana

Abstract

The Ghana school feeding program started in 2005 on a pilot study with one school in each district of the country. Programs such as school feeding are believed to be effective because of its ability to target a specific population which is vulnerable. The research seeks to find out how the school feeding has impacted the educational outcomes such as attendance, enrolment and performance in Ejisu Juaben municipality. The study covered a select group of five schools comparing their enrolment and attendance trends before and after school feeding program. These five school were selected using convenient sampling Academic Performance in literacy and numeracy of pupils in the five schools with school feeding were also compared with pupils from three school not on the school feeding program. The study covered a total of 240 pupils a third of which were from the non-school feeding schools. The study found that school feeding had positively affected both attendance and enrolment. The pupils on the school feeding program studied performed better on both literacy and numeracy than those not on the school feeding program. On the numeracy test the difference in performance was found to be significant . But require further work using a bigger sample size and a longer study duration to be conclusive on the impact of school feeding on the academic performance generally. It is recommended that school management committee SMC should actively monitor and provide feedback to the feeding program office as the quality and quantity of meals given to pupils as it was observed in all the school visited the meals was either insufficient or/and the quality substandard.