Dr. Kwame Asah-Asante, a renowned political analyst, has urged President John Dramani Mahama to revive the school garden system to address the persistent food shortages in Senior High Schools.
This call comes after the President’s directive to redistribute food meant for drought victims to senior high schools nationwide.
Dr. Asah-Asante, in an interview on Morning Starr with Naa Dedei Tettey, while commending the President’s decision, emphasized the need for a more sustainable, long-term solution.
He proposed reintroducing the school garden system, which was prevalent during his school days.
This system would enable schools to develop their own gardens, producing crops like yams and other vegetables, and incorporate animal husbandry into the curriculum.
The political analyst suggested that schools could sell their produce to the public, generating resources to support their feeding programmes in SHSs.
He said, “This is an interim which he has taken fine, but if you want medium to long term, then the approach has to be different. My approach would have been done, we want to make sure there’s constant supply of food to the schools at all times. What do we do? Bring back the school gardens system. When you and I were in school, there were school gardens there operating. We were developing our own gardens. So you’ll see a school where the land is suitable for production of maybe yam, you encourage them to do, produce other crops there.”
“In addition, you box the whole work with animal husbandry and the students are made part of the work there as part of their curriculum. So once you do that the school will be able to generate a lot of resources from maybe when they sell their produce to the public, and generate ideas and also support the school. The school will have food, will have fish and all those products and at the end of the day, government wouldn’t even come there.”
