Government will soon develop a policy to govern the home-grown School Feeding Programme and ensure its sustainability. In addition, an evaluation of the programme would be undertaken to ensure that the current reach of 700,000 pupils is increased to one million by the next academic year. Mr Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, Minister of Local Government and Rural Development announced this at the ninth edition of United Nation’s World Food Programme (WFP) annual walk to raise funds and create awareness about meals served in schools to address child hunger and malnutrition. The walk dubbed “End Hunger: Walk the World” organised by WFP in collaboration with Unilever Ghana, TNT and DSM Nutritional Foods and Golden Tulip Hotel serves as a platform to unite the world with the common belief that hunger, which is simply unacceptable must be eradicated. The 7.5 kilometre walk, which started from the Golden Tulip Hotel, ended at the Athletic Oval of the University of Ghana, Legon. The Sector Minister noted that government was committed to reducing the number of hungry poor people especially children and determined to work extra hard to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. He explained that Ghana’s model of home-grown school feeding programme was an effective outlet for food produced by local farmers and government was instituting measures to enhance food security and reduce income variability for farmers. Mr Ofosu-Ampofo said hungry children must be reached and should not be denied education because of hunger as hunger affected healthy growth in early childhood. Mr Ismail Omer, WFP Country Director said studies had shown that there were more than 66 million hungry school-going age children worldwide. He said WFP needed 3.2 billion dollars annually to reach all of them and 1.2 billion dollars to reach 23 million hungry school-going age children in Africa. Mr Omer said a plate of food in school could help to break the cycle of hunger and poverty, by giving children a healthy start in life. “No child should attend school hungry. This is the goal the WFP has set for itself for 2015 and we are working with our partners, sister agencies, NGOs and donors to achieve,” he added. Mr Sajid Khan, General Manager of Golden Tulip Hotel, said children were the future leaders and everything must be done to nurture their growth. He pledged their continuous support to ensure the total elimination of hunger in the country. Source: GNA