The Kenya Teachers Colleges Principals Association (KTCPA) is upbeat that the school meals program being supported by the National Council for Nomadic Education in Kenya (NACONEK) will improve teaching and learning outcomes in targeted regions.
The association chairperson, Saul Barasa, lauded the initiative saying it will ensure increased enrollment and retention of learners in schools.
Speaking at the ongoing KTCPA annual conference in Mombasa, Barasa observed that teachers training colleges are the single most educators of teachers who are deployed to teach in the primary schools targeted by the meals program, hence the interest of the association in cross-cutting solutions in the education sector.
“We are concerned about school meals and feeding programs because they support learning by allowing children to stay in schools where our graduates are posted to teach”, he said.
According to NACONEK, the school meals program supports 2.3 million primary school learners in arid, semi-arid and urban informal settlements spread across eleven counties and eighty-five sub counties countrywide.
“We supply the schools with hot meals which include cereals and rice, fortified vegetable oil and table salt” said Peninah Kiriago, NACONEK’s representative in the school meals unit.
The council distributes the meals every term and has developed a multi-stakeholder monitoring mechanism to ensure that that the meals reach intended learners.
The Kenya Colleges Teachers Principals Association (KCTPA) annual conference resumed after a three years hiatus due to COVID 19, bringing together institution heads from forty-one public and private teachers training colleges.
Under the auspices of ‘empowering the teacher educator in the era of education reform’, the conference seeks to position teachers training colleges for the adoption and implementation of the recommendations of the recently published Presidential Working Party on Education Reforms (PWPER) taskforce report.
“This conference is important because it gives an opportunity for us to share insights about the PWPER taskforce report, understand what is expected of us as well as our role in implementing the report in totality”, said Barasa.
