New Strategy: Government lunch programme for all primary schools

All pupils may soon be served with hot lunch – a mix of rice and beans or a blend of beans and maize – as the Government strives to increase enrollment in schools.

Schools administrations and local communities will also be required to identify excluded children and to ensure they are enrolled in schools.

Mobile schools

And the Government will expand, equip and strengthen mobile schools and low-cost boarding primary schools, ?where day schools are inappropriate, to improve access and retention in Arid and Semi-Arid Lands, marginalised, hard-to-reach and vulnerable groups.

These are part of the strategies the Ministry of Education wants Parliament to approve to tackle the many challenges facing primary education in the country.

The details are contained in the Sessional Paper to be tabled in Parliament when it resumes next week.

The document, which aptly captures the intention of the Government in the education sector, lists various challenges that must be addressed in basic learning levels.

It says the primary sub-sector has continued to experience high pupil-teacher ratio, overcrowded classrooms, high repetition rates, increased number of orphans due to diseases such as HIV and Aids and inadequate infrastructure.

Also listed are financial management challenges, weak governance, inequitable deployment and weak management of teachers as well as gender and regional disparities.

National policy

The Ministry of Education is pushing for a national policy that will see all children in primary schools get lunch to keep them in schools.

Currently, the school-feeding programme is only rolled out in arid and semi-arid areas, with targeted interventions to keep children in schools.