Nurturing Healthy Children

Address by His Excellency, Dr. Abdullahi Adamu (Sarkin Yakin Keffi & A’are Obateru of the Source), Executive Governor of Nasarawa State on the Occasion of the National Stakeholders Workshop on School Feeding Holding at the Ibrahim Abacha Youth Centre Lafia, Monday, 29th August, 2005

The government and people of Nasarawa State are delighted to host this workshop on the national school feeding programme. On their behalf, I warmly welcome you to our state capital, Lafia. I have no doubt that the Lafia ambience and the hospitality of our people would be conducive to the intellectual rigours of your national assignment. Let me caution, however, that this forum is not meant for splitting academic hairs. That temptation, if it arises, must be resisted,

This workshop is about the future of our country. Our children are the future of our country. The primary objective of the national school feeding programme is to help nurture healthy children who will grow into healthy adults mentally and physically equipped to take on the onerous leadership responsibilities in the public and the private sectors of our national life in the future. Your task here is to work out a practicable blueprint for a successful and sustainable implementation of this important programme. It is not an easy task. You must not treat it with levity. The fate of this programme hangs on what you do or fail to do at this workshop. Your willingness to participate in it is proof that you are prepared to commit your sweat and your time to this critical national assignment. It is my hope that you will do what is right for our children and our country.

The school feeding programme is not particularly new in Nigeria. The British colonial authorities introduced a school feeding programme too. Some of us here were beneficiaries of that programme. We can recall with some nostalgia the distribution of very palatable powdered milk to students in post-primary institutions in the then Northern Region. The colonial programme became a victim of our serial tinkering with our educational system since our independence. It was abandoned and forgotten. Our children were the immediate losers but our nation was the ultimate loser. Its rebirth at this time in our national history is a welcome development. As parents and guardians who care for the health of our children and the future of our country, our obligation to support it and make it succeed should be a given.

Our president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, is, to use a hackneyed but still appropriate expression, the moving spirit behind this new national initiative on the school feeding programme. It is part of his comprehensive programme to overhaul and reposition our educational system to enable it produce healthy, educated young men and women as distinct from certificated young men and women. I am privileged to know that Mr. President is anxious to make a positive difference in this vital sector of our national development. I also know that he has put his shoulder to this plough and he is not looking back. As good and committed followers, we too should put our shoulders to the plough. It is, in the word of our national anthem, the call of Nigeria that we cannot but obey.

The Federal Government hopes, and we share in these hopes, that by bringing all the stakeholders together to rub minds at this forum on the implementation strategy for the programme the workshop will produce the right blueprint to which all of us can be committed. This is not an idle hope. Some of the best technocrats and educational administrators are assembled in this workshop. Only the best can come from the great brains at this forum. I know that we will have a rich harvest of implementation modules which will be hammered into a practicable policy. I urge you to always remember that our objective is to produce a practicable and not a theoretical blue print. We are lucky that in re-initiating this programme, its failure and abandonment in the past will guide us along the path of its success and sustainability. Let me take this opportunity to commend the Federal Ministry of Education for its commitment to this programme. The national school feeding programme is in partial fulfillment of the provisions of the UBE Act, 2004.

Some of you may wonder why the federal government chose our state to host this historic workshop. Nasarawa was privileged to be challenged by His Excellency, Mr. President last year to undertake the pilot scheme of the national school feeding programme. The government and the people of the state enthusiastically welcomed it as a rare opportunity for our state to experiment with a national programme that may define the future of our educational development. The reform agenda of the Obasanjo administration would be incomplete if it did not ginger us to take the feeding and health of our children much more seriously than we do now. We share the federal government belief that the success of a programme of this magnitude requires a national plan of action. It cannot be left to individual states to determine whether to implement it or how to implement it. We are pleased to report that the pilot scheme which took off only last July is proceeding beautifully. This workshop is a logical but a giant step forward in the national implementation of the programme.

Let me tell you a little about the pilot scheme of the national school feeding programme in our state. Our technical partner for the scheme is Tetrapak (West Africa) Ltd. We would like to acknowledge their commitment and technical support for the programme. We have benefited immensely from their expertise and guidance. We thank the officials of the company who have worked with us since the programme began. We count on their continued support for the national task ahead.

The programme is intended to specifically prevent hunger and correct known nutrient deficiencies amongst pre-school and school-going children. Iron, zinc, iodine and vitamin A deficiencies are responsible for the poor health of our children. We are using ultra high temperature treated (UHT) 250ml nutritional supplement, called Nutri-Sip for the programme. Nutri-Sip contains 30 trace elements that meet the daily requirements of growing children. Our objective is a balanced diet. Our ultimate aim is to balance the consumption of such stable foods as maize, millet, sorghum, cassava and other starchy foods with high carbohydrate content with Nutri-Sip. We strongly believe, on expert advice, that although this approach is simple, it is consistent with the implementation of a similar programme in other countries.

The specific objectives of our programme in the state are to:

i. Eradicate hunger among our children

 

ii. Improve the nutritional status of school children in our primary and junior secondary schools;

 

iii. Increase enrollment and retention of school children in schools;

 

iv. Raise the attendance levels at school;

 

v. Enhance performance of children for sustainable educational development of the State; and

 

vi. Reduce morbidity and mortality rates among school children.

 

The test-run of the programme took off in June this year. I am pleased to inform you that we have spared no expenses in prosecuting it. Our commitment to the programme is consistent with our belief that what we do with the health and the education of our children today would determine the kind of legacy we leave for future generations of our people. This budget has funded the implementation of the programme so far. We now have a modern office complex with state of the art IT facilities to ease communication. I urge you to take some time off to visit the secretariat of the programme during your stay in Lafia. You would be glad you did.

A programme such as this for the benefit of the people must involve the people and their leaders at all levels. Right from the beginning, therefore, we enlisted the support of parents/teachers associations, our revered royal fathers, community leaders, community-based groups and non-governmental organizations for the programme. We are pleased to say that we owe the impact the programme has made so far and so early in its life to the active support of these people and organizations.

I do not wish to leave you with the impression that this programme is sailing on calm waters in the state. It has faced some problems. As you know, this programme is now new in the country. Our first problem is the absence of technocratic expertise we could tap from. The second problem was the non- availability of the liquid food with the required nutrients for the programme. We solved the first problem the same way that great inventor, Thomas Edison did. We took it one step at time and each false step became a propelling force. We tackled the second problem by importing the necessary supplement. We ordered and paid for 10 million units of Nutri-Sip. So far, we have taken delivery of 3.6 million units which are currently stored in our warehouses at Lafia, Keffi and Akwanga, from where they are distributed to schools using the ten delivery trucks specifically procured for this purpose. We are renovating four other warehouses at Awe, Lafia, Karu and Nasarawa as additional storage facilities for the programme.

The ultimate success of the programme depends on the commitment of school heads, teachers and even parents to it. We have taken the necessary steps to sensitize them to their role and responsibilities in this programme. We are happy with their response. They are making a judicious use of the supplement and also guarding against its misuse.

Effective monitoring is also critical to the success of the programme. We must be able to determine its impact on our children. What we have done in this regard is create health data such as weight, height and arm circumference measurement of the children at the beginning of the programme. These are then measured periodically to see how individual children are responding to the programme. In addition, we will periodically assess the academic performances of the children to determine how improved nutrition impacts on their performance. These measures, we believe, are the best means of judging how well or how poorly the programme is proceeding. It will also advise us on what changes need to be made to the nutrient supplement.

 

Before the children begin the programme, we also de-worm them, using Albendazole a broad-spectrum worm expeller to free them from worms and related intestinal infestations. We want to feed our children, not worms.

The national school feeding programme is huge in conception, implementation and funding. Continued importation of the required nutrients will, certaintly, make it much more expensive. To guarantee its sustainability, we must produce these nutrients locally. We have begun to explore this option in Nasarawa State. We achieved a breakthrough in June this year when powder samples of millet, maize and cassava were tested by one of Tetrapak partners, Solea in St Louis, USA. Cassava and maize were found to be suitable raw materials for the nutrient supplements. Cocoa and yellow maize were also reported to be viable produce for the formulations of the supplement. The company is currently formulating cassava into a basic, flavoured prototype drink. We expect to receive samples of this in the next few weeks. We have reason to believe that we should find the formulation satisfactory. We have already taken steps to set up or identify reliable production units in the country for the local production of nutria-sip. Both the UNDP and UNIDO have shown interest in helping us to up grade existing plants to meet with this new production demand. We expect local production of nutria-sip to begin in the first or second quarter of next year.

I hope that in telling you what we have done so far, I am not blowing our horn although we believe that good and success stories need to go round. Sometimes, it may take a horn to do it. My aim is to show you that the only magic to social transformation is a good plan and an unequivocal commitment to it. To borrow from building engineers, we have laid the solid foundation on which this national programme can be built. We have shown that the national school feeding programme is do-able. It is now your task to tell us how best it can be done now and sustained for ever. Your deliberations must be devoid of personal or sectional interests. You must be guided only by our national interests and the future progress and development of our dear country. It is my hope that we who are privileged to participate in this workshop will look back to it in the near future and cherish it as a milestone in our educational development and our social transformation.

I am truly honoured to now declare this workshop open. I wish you all fruitful deliberations.

 

Thank you and God bless.

Saturday, April 14, 2007
 
 

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