School Feeding: Federal Government Begins Biometric Capture In Borno State

To effectively facilitate the National homegrown school feeding programme, the Nigerian Government has commenced biometric capture of primary schools in Borno.

Borno State in collaboration with the federal Government had on July 7th commenced the school feeding programme in the State to provide nutritious meals to all pupils in public primary school from primary 1 to 3 across the state.

The biometric capture of schools in Borno commenced earlier at Konduga LGA and Jere LGA respectively which is targeting beneficiaries of about six hundred and forty-two thousand five (642,500) pupils.

The Headmistress of the school, Hauwa Yusuf Balami, had said, the feeding scheme made pupils to be more punctual at school.

In her words “Most of the pupils here are from vulnerable families and lack of feeding has made a lot of them to stay back. But with the introduction of the feeding programme we have a great turn out we already have about 827 pupils who are currently benefiting out of the enrolment list of 1600 and is still counting and also hope the Federal government and the Borno State would extend to primary 4,5 and 6”.

The state consultant in charge of enumeration exercise, Mohammed Alfa, told journalists at 1000 housing estate primary school that “Borno state is a peculiar state in terms of numerous challenges, insecurity and IDPs. These are bound to affect some of our plans, for example, the issue of IDPs children who were relocated from point A to B etc”.

He said though the biometric capture started last week; the exercise has been smooth even though there had been technical problem with the enrolment tablets.

He further added,” the initial target in Borno is 112,500 beneficiaries, but based on an updated data it roused to 642, 500 and we have only 55 tablets for the enrolment we are expecting 212 other tablets. The moment that comes in we will have a total of 267 enumerations that will be going around the 27 LGAs.