The Eastern Regional Minister, Mr Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, has called on the district assembly desk officers of the School Feeding Programme, to avoid inflating figures of children benefiting from the project in their districts with the intention of taken advantage of the scheme. He urged them to use the project to promote local business by purchasing food items from local farmers. He suggested the introduction of fruits like oranges, pawpaw and pineapples, so that the project could help reduce the periodic fruit glut in some areas, while at the same time improving the nutritional quality of the meals. Mr Ofosu-Ampofo reiterated that the scheme should be used to introduce the consumption of cocoa products like chocolate drink and chocolate to children in cocoa growing areas to help create internal demand for cocoa products. He advised the officials of the scheme to work closely with the district and regional health directorates in their areas, to know areas which had mal-nutritional problems to help them in the selection of schools that should be included in the scheme. The National Coordinator of the Ghana School Feeding Programme, Alhaji Abdul Rahman, said efforts are being put in place to build a good image for the project, and promise to run a socially accountable project, where anybody could walk into any of the offices of the scheme for information. Alhaji Rahman said the programme was the only school feeding project being run in Africa, so the international community was very interested and Ghana should not fail. He said government had budgeted 50 million Ghana Cedis for the project, which is an improvement on the 39 million Ghana Cedis spent by the project last year, and assured that with donor inflows the scheme could bring more schools on board. Source: GNA