The government is to review the Ghana School Feeding Programme to ensure that only schools in deprived urban and rural areas benefit from the programme. The Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Mr Joseph Yieleh-Chireh, who gave the hint, expressed worry that many of the schools benefiting from the programme were not in deprived communities. That situation, he said, prevented the poor schools that the feeding programme was meant for from benefiting. Mr Yieleh-Chireh was giving a progress report on the activities of the local governance at the meet press in Accra Tuesday. He touched on sanitation, demolition of unauthorised structures, births and deaths registration, street numbering and property identification. Currently, 1,698 schools with 760,000 pupils are getting one hot meal daily from locally grown foodstuffs. Mr Yieleh-Chireb said the ministry was embarking on a nationwide sensitisation programme on the school feeding programme, and was expected to increase the number of beneficiaries from 760,000 pupils to 1.04 million pupils. He stressed that the right thing must be done to ensure that well-endowed schools did not benefit from the school feeding programme to the disadvantage of deprived schools. On the membership of unit committees, Mr Yieleh-Chireh said the number of unit committee members would be reduced from the current number of about 15,000 to only 5,000. He said all the members would be elected and that there would not be any appointments to the unit committees. That, he said, was to ensure efficient administration at reduced cost. Mr Yieleh-Chireh said the Environmental Sanitation Policy initiated in 2009 had been finalised and approved by the Cabinet. He said a strategic investment plan for sanitation had been developed while the National Sanitation Strategy Action Plan was being developed. Mr Yieleh-Chireh said the Urban Environmental Sanitation Project II was to ensure proper solid waste management with emphasis on the poor in Accra, Sekondi-Takoradi, Kumasi, Tema and Tamale. He said four public toilets and 30 school toilets were constructed last year. Mr Yieleh-Chireh said work on drains in various parts of the country had been completed while others were near completion. He said the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) had completed negotiations with a firm to review the design of the Kwabenya landfill site. Bids for the construction of the Tema landfill site were received in April last year and evaluated. He said the five-year Urban Poverty Reduction Project had created temporary employment to 2,230 people, while the project had disbursed GH¢423,066 to 66 people. Mr Yieleh-Chireh said the registration of births, deaths and marriages had improved with the introduction of computerised-based registration. He said plans were far advanced to extend the registration exercise to all communities to ease the tedium associated with it. Mr Yieleh-Chireh said the government would support any efforts by the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) to ensure sanity in the construction of houses and management of sanitation. Source: Daily Graphic