The Executive Director of Eduwatch Africa, Kofi Asare, says the centralization of the management of senior high schools’ food supplies makes sense on the basis of economy of scale.

According to him, after perusing the policy document of the free senior high school policy, he was convinced that the centralization of food supplies management was a more cost effective and efficient system in comparison to the previous decentralized system.

Explaining the logic behind the centralization agenda on JoyNews’ PM Express, he noted that it is a very practical way to ensure high value for money.

“There is an economy of scale sense in the sense that if one company is supposed to supply just ten cartons of mackerel to Twifo Praso secondary school, they would definitely buy it from Twifo Praso, the farthest they’ll go will be Cape Coast.

“But if one company is supplying mackerel to the whole region of let’s say about a hundred schools, they can import because we don’t produce mackerel here or they can buy at factory price or at warehouse price and get it very cheap. And so that was one of the justifications of centralizing the procurement of some of the foodstuff,” he said.

He added that “I believe that as a practitioner within the policy space campaigning for spending efficiency, economy of scale provided sufficient justification that we can centralize the procurement because our interest is that spend but as much as practicable let’s have high value for money.

“So if you’re going to spend more, if procurement of mackerel, rice, tin tomatoes, these three for instance is going to be high at the district level then consider option B if it’s going to be low. That is why I think that the justification on grounds of economy of scale made sense.”

He argued that even though the current centralized system is being plagued with food shortages – a phenomenon not experienced with the decentralized system – the problem was not with the new system but rather the government’s delay in the disbursement of funds.

Kofi Asare insisted that even though the decentralized system had proven to be better, in the face of the food shortages plaguing the centralized system, the government’s delays in disbursement of funds would have generated similar situations for that system too.

Explaining the issue with the disbursement challenges, he said, “The free senior high school policy we’re talking about is 70% feeding. The whole menu, the bouquet called free senior high school is 70% feeding of students. That is in terms of the financial portfolio.

“So anytime disbursement of free senior high school funds delays for example 2.3 billion  budgeted for this year, any time there is a delay in the disbursement of that money the first thing it affects and what it affects most is feeding.”

“We’re talking about 1.4billion being spent on feeding in free senior high schools. Out of the 1.4 billion about 1.1 billion will go to buffer stock for the commodities that they supply through their contractors and the remaining 300 or so million will go to the schools to purchase the perishables.

“Now if you look at the calendar of 12 months, for 10 months out of the 12 months, students are in school, either in part or in full because you’re running a track. So you either have some of them or all of them in school. But for ten months at any point in time apart from Easter break students are in school. The only time students are not in school is from the 3^rd and 4^th week of December up to the 2^nd week of February.

“It means that if you did the projections carefully, Ministry of Finance will have to be disbursing averagely 100 million Ghana cedis every month from February to November to ensure that there is no disruption of supply. What we’re seeing is not the case and that is why the Ministry of Finance is owing supplies to the tune of over 300million,” he further explained.