MP Warns Government Against Raiding GETFund to Pay for School Feeding Programme

The government is spending 42 percent of the Ghana Education Trust Fund’s budget on feeding senior high school students — a diversion that the Member of Parliament for Atiwa East, Abena Osei Asare, has publicly cautioned against, arguing that GETFund’s core mandate is infrastructure, not meals.

“GETFund’s core mandate is to help with the infrastructure of the schools,” Ms Osei Asare told Parliament. “We can use other sources of revenue to fund this equally good programme, but not the monies that should go to GETFund for infrastructure.”

An Infrastructure Backlog Worth Billions

The stakes of the diversion are not abstract. Uncompleted school infrastructure across the country is estimated at between GHS8 billion and GHS10 billion — a staggering sum that reflects years of underinvestment in classrooms, laboratories, and dormitories. Every cedi redirected from construction to catering deepens that backlog.

The concerns echo a broader tension in Ghana’s education financing. The World Bank’s recent $300 million commitment to end the double-track system in senior high schools underscores just how much investment the sector requires — and how easily funds can be siphoned away from their intended purpose. At the same time, the Education Minister has acknowledged a deficit of up to 90,000 teachers, yet another symptom of a budget stretched too thin.

Finding Alternative Revenue

Ms Osei Asare stopped short of suggesting the feeding programme be scrapped. Instead, she urged the Finance Minister and the Majority Leader to identify alternative revenue streams that could sustain school feeding without cannibalising the infrastructure fund. Her prescription is practical: ring-fence GETFund for its statutory purpose and find the money elsewhere.

She also called on the government to earmark adequate GETFund allocations in the 2027 national budget, expected in November, so that ongoing projects can be completed and the Ministry of Education receives sufficient funding to carry out its expanded responsibilities.

A Structural Problem, Not Just a Budget Line

The GETFund raid is symptomatic of a wider pattern in Ghana’s public finances, where recurring expenditure routinely crowds out capital investment. Feeding students is undeniably important — hungry children cannot learn — but doing so at the expense of the buildings in which they are supposed to learn creates a perverse trade-off. Schools that are well-fed but housed in crumbling, incomplete structures are no model of progress.

Parliament will need to decide, in the months ahead, whether to enforce the statutory boundaries of GETFund or continue allowing it to serve as a catch-all for whatever the education budget cannot cover. Ms Osei Asare’s intervention has drawn the line clearly; the question now is whether the executive will listen.

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