The government has been urged to adopt a long-term solution to the rising cost of student feeding in Ghana’s Colleges of Education by investing directly in agricultural infrastructure within the schools.
This proposal, according to Dr. Frank Ackah, a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Coast, could significantly reduce the burden on the public purse while promoting food sustainability on campuses.
In an exclusive interview with The High Street Journal, Dr. Ackah questioned the current model where the government feeds thousands of teacher trainees daily with limited resources.
“It is not sustainable,” he said. “Instead of giving money year after year, government should channel that funding into setting up school farms and agro-processing units for each college,” he said.
Dr. Ackah proposed a transition plan where, for instance, the government commits to provide two years’ worth of feeding funds upfront to colleges as capital for setting up farms. These farms, he said, should focus on staple foods like cassava, plantain, maize, and vegetables, which are already common in college meals.
“Imagine each college having at least five acres of cassava, or two acres of plantain,” he noted. “Over time, the institutions will become self-reliant, and government will no longer need to spend as much feeding them.”
He further suggested that these farms could be supported by national service personnel and casual labour, or even involve agricultural training components for students. Some colleges, like Atebubu College of Education in the past, had successful school farms producing palm oil and food for their kitchens, he recalled.
The call comes amid growing criticism of the government’s recent shift to providing just one meal a day to students in colleges of education, a move Dr. Ackah says is politically risky and socially unfair. “Most of these students enrolled knowing they’d be fed,” he said. “Cutting down meals without an alternative system in place is not just economically shortsighted—it could also affect enrollment and morale.”
He also called on the Ministry of Education and Ghana Tertiary Education Commission to consider making school farms mandatory and to integrate agricultural planning into the performance assessment of college principals.
“Feeding students is important, but teaching them to feed themselves is transformational,” he concluded.
