Basic Education Dept wants to modernise school nutrition system after KZN problems

The Basic Education Department says it has to modernise its school nutrition system and develop a new model after experiencing problems in KwaZulu-Natal.

Two million learners were forced to attend classes on empty stomachs after the service provider failed to deliver food.

The department has briefed Parliament’s basic education committee about the national school nutrition programme.

The department had to send a team to KwaZulu-Natal to try resolve the non-delivery of food in the province.

Deputy Director-General Dr Granville Whittle told MPs the problem with KwaZulu-Natal was that it had over 2,000 service providers servicing over 5,000 schools compared to other provinces with fewer service providers.

He said that the programme needed to be centralised nationally.

“We say we’ve got to modernise the programme and we need to develop a new model for the national school nutrition programme. One of the ways we need to do that is to take advantage of economies of scale, to use that R9.8 billion budget centrally to purchase what we need to provide to schools. We estimate that that alone will save about 60% of the budget.”

Whittle says there’s also lot of wastage in the programme when providers served meals that aren’t only rejected by learners, but that aren’t approved by the department.

-EWN

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