Government’s initiative to provide final year Junior High School (JHS) students, teachers and staff with one hot meal a day started on Monday.

Some students have expressed gratitude to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo for fulfilling his promise.

The initiative, expected to last for the next 20 days, will benefit about 584,000 pupils and 146,000 teachers in about 17,440 private and public JHS schools across the country.

The President announced the initiative in his 15th update on the country’s Covid-19 mitigation measures and said the decision was based on reports that some pupils were going hungry in school due to their compliance with the safety protocols.

A visit by the Ghana News Agency to the Genuine International School, a private JHS at Ablekuma Oduman in the Ga West Municipal Assembly, showed that about 40 pupils and their teachers were served plain rice with stew and a boiled egg with a sachet of water at 12:20 pm.

Margaret Afum, a final year JHS student, described the initiative as a "timely intervention" and thanked the government for the free meal, saying: “This meal will help me stay in school and study for extra hours even after our lesson period”.

A teacher at the School, Mr Amos Akpah, lauded the President for fulfilling his promise and prayed that the meals would be delivered on time.

At the Nii Kodjo Ababioo Basic School at Mamprobi in the Ablekuma South Sub-Metro of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, Mr Kwame Nkrumah, a teacher, commended the government for the foresight and said many more students had reported to school because of the free lunch.

He, however, appealed for a reconsideration of the menu saying, “Eggs for the students, fine, but we, the teachers, cannot take eggs every day because of our age,’’ he said.

A teacher at the Mamprobi Evangelical Presbyterian Basic School, Mr Ben Nyavor, was please with both the taste and the quality of the food.