The Caretaker of the Gender, Children and Social Protection Ministry, Cecilia Dapaah, has announced that the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) has been put on hold.

She made this known when she was answering questions on expansion of the scheme to cover non-beneficiary public basic schools across the country.

According to Madam Cecilia Dapaah, the expansion would be resumed when arrears owed the Ghana National School Feeding Caterers Association are cleared and a system is put in place to monitor payments.

Currently, however, arrears for the 2021 academic year have been paid to the caterers except third term, according to the Public Relations Officer of the Association, Caroline Aboagye.

“98% of caterers who had approval from the GSFP have received their money. The two per cent who have not received their monies have mismatched names and mixed E-Zwich numbers.

“Those are the only few who have not received their monies for the second term of the 2021 academic year.

We still plead with the government and the secretariat to speed up things for us to receive the third term payments to enable us to work diligently,” she said in an interview with Citi newsroom.

Meanwhile, expansion of the programme, as announced during the presentation of the 2022 budget in Parliament by the Minister for Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta, is expected to be increased to benefit 4 million pupils across the country.

Currently, the number of pupils signed onto the programme stands at 3.4 million from over 10,832 public basic schools, having increased from 1.7 million in 2016/2017.