Mrs Doris Yashi, the Bauchi State Programme Manager, Home Grown School Feeding Programme (HGSFP), on Friday, says it has concluded arrangements to train 7,584 food vendors in good catering services, personal and environmental hygiene.
Yashi said this in an interview with News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Bauchi.
According to her, the training is a proactive measure to improve the quality of food the vendors serve to pupils daily.
She said that the training would ensure that school children ate healthy foods as required by the Federal Government.
She added that the training would expose participants to modern methods of serving dishes using clean utensils, noting that the school pupils’ health was paramount.
She also stressed the importance of hand washing, saying “we do not want to see a food vendor picking her nose, scratching her head and looking untidy while serving pupils.
“We do not want any transmission of diseases, we have to introduce operational guidelines for food vendors. School headmasters and headmistresses are to ensure that only clean and tidy food vendors serve food to pupils.
“We have a register to guide us trace defaulting vendors.”
She, however, noted that because of the large number, the training would be conducted at the zonal levels.
Yashi said that the HGSFP in Bauchi partnered with the State Primary Healthcare Development Agency to strengthen health activities in the benefiting schools.
According to her, the state office has also introduced a monitoring mechanism to check food vendors short changing pupils.
The programme manager said that attendance registers for food vendors had been introduced in schools to track the time the vendors arrived at the schools, noting that the registers, which must be signed daily, must indicate the number of pupils fed.
Yashi said that any food vendor found short changing the programme after several warnings would be sanctioned.
“Short changing the pupils by serving them small quantity of food will increase the number of out-of-school children.
‘This programme had retained and re-enrolled some out-of-school children, so we will not allow anything to take them out-of-school again,” She said.
Yashi said that the state programme office had no access to any food vendor’s account as the Federal Government credit their accounts directly.
Yashi said that she was disappointment with some teachers who insisted that food vendors served them food meant for pupils.
She added that the programme found out this during monitoring visits to schools and interviews with school neighbourhood, vendors and some pupils.
Yashi said that some teachers even threatened to delete some food vendors from the programme for not giving them food.
She explained that teachers were not part of the School Feeding Programme and they did not have authority to remove any food vendor from the programme.
“I was disappointed with some teachers during my monitoring visit to a school where I saw food warmers belonging to some teachers who collect food from vendors.
“I warned the headmasters on such act and they have assured me that it would not happen again.”
