The national government has announced plans to do away with the school feeding program. The announcement has caused an uproar in the National Assembly. Treasury has proposed the scrapping of the allocation to the program in the 2024/2025 financial year budget estimates.
Ruto’s economic advisor David Ndii, in his defense, on Wednesday, explained that the school feeding program had been allocated zero budget in the 2024/25 financial year budget estimates.
This is because it was being handled by NACONEK which is an autonomous entity in the Ministry of Education. NACONEK’s mandate aims to meet the educational needs of the Nomadic regions by empowering school-going children in those areas.
NACONEK Pulling Out
Ndii justified the zero budget allocation remarking that this was not one of the core mandates of the council. He emphasized that NACONEK would continue empowering marginalized communities through other avenues despite discontinuing the feeding program.
“NACONEK is a generous benefactor to other worthy causes, for example, it has recently gifted Nairobi School a Ksh100 million state-of-the-art kitchen,” he stated.
Ruto’s economic advisor has however held that though NACONEK has exited from the school program, children from marginalized counties would still receive food from the government through The Ministry of East African Community, Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASALs), and Regional Development led by CS Peninah Malonza.
PS Kipsang: Treasury, Think About This
“The biggest challenge we are facing is that the whole budget has been removed, those of us who take three meals a day might not know the feeling of what happens when a child does not have a meal in certain parts of this country, that is why I wanted my colleagues from Treasury who think this program is not important to be here,” lamented Basic Education PS Belio Kipsang at the Julius Melly committee.
Defending the budget, PS Kipsang complained of huge cuts in next year’s budget estimates totaling KES .7B in the recurrent budget. He also warned of dire consequences in schools if more money is not released to the ministry saying the new enrollments had spiked thanks to the feeding programme. He says there is a deficit of KES 15.4B.
