The Benue State government had recruited a total of 4,150 cooks for the Home Grown School Feeding programme of the Buhari administration.
The Senior Special Assistant to Benue State Governor Engr. Utaan Terhide, made this announcement over the weekend while briefing newsmen in Makurdi, the Benue State capital.
He maintained that the schools feeding program would take off in no distant time.
According to Utaan, the Social Investment Program office in Benue adopted the use of Community Based Targeting approach for the recruitment of the food vendors out of the 16,000 applications received by the Home Grown School Feeding office, adding that due to logistics constraints, many applicants could not be accommodated in the program.
According to him, a total of 272,818 pupils in primary 1-3 out of the 949,047 enrolments in public primary schools in the state would benefit from the program, with a daily feeding of N70.00 per child amounting to a daily transfer of N19,097.260 to the food vendors which transcend to about N3,819,452,000.00 per annum.
He added that the Benue State Social Investment Office in collaboration with Center for Food Technology and Agriculture (CEFTA), Benue State University has successfully trained the recruited cooks on Food Safety and Hygiene, cutting across the 23 LGAs of the state and issued certificates to all participants.
“We have matched their Bank Verification Numbers (BVN) with their bank accounts and those that have been matched has been compiled and shared with the NHGSFT, NIBSS and the social investment banking partners.
Meanwhile, in Kaduna State, the state government was forced to stop the feeding programme after spending over N10bn.
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