Acute food shortage hits Wa School for the Deaf

By Philip Tengzu, GNA
Wa, (UW/R), July 20, GNA – Children at the Wa School for the Deaf (WADEAF) are in serious anguish due to an acute food shortage making life unbearable for some children.
The school has not received feeding grants from the government since the beginning of this academic year leaving the vulnerable school children in a critical condition with the risk of malnutrition.
Mr Eugene Miebu, the Chairman of the school’s Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), who revealed this to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in an interview in Wa, said the management of the school was currently struggling to feed the children.
The WADEAF has about 250 children from Kindergarten to Junior High School, but for the whole academic year, it has not received any government money as a feeding grant.
The GNA gathered that the WADEAF cultivated maize on campus, which the school children were feeding on for the past months following the school management’s ingenuity but that had also been exhausted.
The GNA also gathered that the school management sometimes borrowed grains from some teachers of the school to cook for the children with the hope that when they received food supply then it would repay those teachers when necessary.
Mr Miebu said, “After borrowing the maize, getting money to buy ingredients for the soup is also a challenge.
“Sometimes, they (the school authority) have to go and beg some of the teachers that have gardens in the school for beans or pumpkin leaves for the cooks to prepare for them to eat,” the PTA Chairman added.
“The government gives us the money and the suppliers will provide the food for us. But because the money has not come for more than a year now, the suppliers have also stopped.
When the school was getting support, every Thursday, the children ate eggs and every week they ate meat, they were satisfied and able to learn but now things have changed, it is not easy for us,” Mr Miebu lamented.
He said the situation was not peculiar to the WADEAF, the Wa School for the Blind and the St. Don Bosco Special School all in Loho near Wa were not also spared.
Mr Miebu, therefore, appealed to the government to turn its attention to the special schools in the region and the country as a whole to alleviate the plight of vulnerable children.
He also appealed to benevolent individuals and organisations to come to the aid of special needs children by providing them with food to enable them concentrate on academic work.
Meanwhile, Madam Sophia Dimah Nandzo, the Wa Municipal Director of Education, said the issue of the feeding challenges at the WADEAF had come to her attention and that they had made a request to the necessary authority for the grants but was yet to get any response.
Madam Nandzo said she had appealed to the Wa Municipal Assembly to consider supporting the special schools in the municipality with food to reduce the plight of the children, but no response had been given yet.
“Unfortunately, these are children that their parents are also poor. In other places philanthropists donate to these schools but it is not like that here (in Upper West).