Every year, basic schools in Ghana face a growing challenge of supplying nutritious school meals, which in turn impacts the physical, mental, and social health of children as well as school attendance, engagement, and performance. This is due to inadequate government grants for school meals and the lack of leadership from school managers to mobilize alternatives (e.g. public-private partnerships) towards addressing food insecurity and malnutrition among school-aged children in Ghana. According to the Ghana Demographic and Health Survey (GDHS) conducted in 2019, food insecurity and malnutrition affect approximately 20% of school-aged children (ages 5-17) in Ghana, and are more prevalent in rural areas. The survey also revealed that Nutrition-related problems among school-aged children include stunting (affecting 19%), being underweight (8%), anemia (34%), and vitamin A deficiency (15%). The survey data also highlighted the emerging issue of being overweight, which affects 5% of school-aged children in Ghana, with a higher prevalence in urban areas.
School Farms has developed a community-based, intersectional approach that targets food security, nutrition, and agriculture skills development by cultivating farms within schools to grow produce and offer an experiential space for teaching and learning. Working with its partners, School Farms mobilises seeds, labour, and technical support to facilitate year-round cultivation and contribute to schools’ meal programmes. Using a Project-Based Learning approach, students are involved in design, growing, and harvesting, using bed, raised box, clay pot, and sack gardens. And they learn about healthy meal choices and preparation practices. Produce harvested from the school farm provides a greater quantity of quality food to be consumed by students. And surplus harvest can be a means to generate income for the school. School Farms is also developing a toolkit that teaches students how to implement gardens and prepare healthy foods at home.
On average, there has been a 40% reduction in school meal budgets within partner schools, which in turn has encouraged other schools to design and implement School Farms’ approach. The low-tech approach is well-suited for the Government of Ghana’s efforts to improve skills acquisition across subjects. For example, students are able to make predictions and conduct experiments (science), plot out dimensions (math), and learn the history and politics of food access (social studies). In 2022, School Farms secured the commitment of the Ghana School Feeding Programme and the Ghana Education Service to include school farms in feeding programmes and curricula, towards enhancing agricultural education and improving food security within schools.