The Western Cape school feeding scheme, which provides lunch meals to more than 430 000 pupils, will start providing breakfast.
|||Cape Town - The Western Cape school feeding scheme, which provides lunch meals to more than 430 000 pupils daily, will soon start providing breakfast to pupils five days a week.
Education MEC Donald Grant said that following an increase in the budget and a successful pilot project with 153 schools last year, schools were now serving breakfast on three days a week and this would increase to five days a week from July.
The pupils receive maize meal for breakfast, but schools would be offered more choices of porridge from July. The meals would be served before school.
Grant said the extra meal would not only provide more nutrition to pupils, but would also encourage pupils to arrive early for school.
“It is a sad reality that many of our learners rely on a meal at school as their only meal of the day,” he said.
He visited Acadezmia Primary in Eerste River on Monday, one of the schools which stands to benefit from the expansion of the feeding scheme.
He said that in 2009, 334 287 pupils were benefiting from the feeding scheme, but this had since increased to 430 000 pupils in 1 022 schools.
Funding for school feeding has more than doubled from R112 million in 2009/10 to R260m in 2013/14. Grant said the increased budget did not only allow for additional pupils to benefit from the scheme, but also provided for more nutritious meals to be served.
He said the nutritional value had increased with the inclusion of fresh fruit and vegetables, tinned fish and lentils.
The Western Cape school feeding scheme’s providers are the Peninsula School Feeding Association, Inyameko and the N2 Rural Development Forum. More than 2 800 volunteers assist schools with preparing and serving the meals.
ilse.fredericks@inl.co.za
Cape Argus