Of Social Investment And The Development Of Basic Education In Nigeria- What Does The School Feeding Program Offer?

Abstract

Social investment as a complement to social expenditure focuses on specific social needs, specifies its goals and outlines its expected outcome(s). Government around the world have found the need to complement  social expenditures with social investment drives in other to achieve some socioeconomic outcomes in the area of health, employment, education and income. In 2016, government of Nigeria adopted the home grown school feeding program which to be implemented in the public primary schools across the country. Amongst others, the main goal of the program is to increase the number of primary school enrolment and retention rates, as well as improve child nutrition. Guided by the social return on investment concept and model, this study sought to examine the relationship between the enrolment and completion rates for male and female public primary school pupils and the expendpenditure on school feeding. A panel dataset of six states from the six geographical regions of Nigeria where the school feeding program has been implemented from 2017 -2021 was developed. We employ the generalized least squares (GLS) for random effects as determined by the Hausman test for analysis. Our major findings is that on the one hand, school feeding has had more significant effect on primary school completion rate for male than female pupils. On the other hand, it has had a better significance on female primary school enrolment rate. We therefore recommend periodic evaluation, health incentives for the pupils and economic incentives for the parents.