Sierra Leone’s Minister of Information and Civic Education, Chernor Bah, has linked school feeding to education, agriculture, youth employment and national self-reliance, saying the programme should be viewed as part of a broader investment in the country’s human capital and food systems.
Minister Bah made the statement during a high-level event on the margins of the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, titled “School Meals for the Future: Leaders Accelerating Progress.”
The event was co-hosted by the World Food Programme (WFP) and The Rockefeller Foundation and brought together senior government officials, development leaders, philanthropists and influential content creators to discuss how locally produced school meals can improve learning while strengthening national food systems.
Among the speakers were His Majesty King Letsie III of Lesotho; Kenya’s First Lady, Rachel Ruto; former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown; Nobel Peace Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus; Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs Ma. Theresa Lazaro; WFP Acting Executive Director Carl Skau; Rockefeller Foundation President Rajiv Shah; and global content creator Jimmy Donaldson, popularly known as MrBeast.
Minister Bah joined France’s Minister Delegate for International Partnerships, Éléonore Caroit, and youth climate educator Sage Lenier on a panel that examined how influence, civic action and youth leadership can accelerate development.
Drawing on his personal experience, Minister Bah said the issue of school feeding was deeply important to him.
“I went to school hungry,” he said, recalling the challenges faced by many children in Sierra Leone who grow up in families forced to make difficult choices between food and other basic needs.
He said his early advocacy focused largely on access to education, but his experience had shown him that hunger and education cannot be treated as separate issues.
“For a child, the questions are simple: Can I get to school? Can I eat? Can I concentrate? Can I dream beyond today?” he said.
Minister Bah linked the issue to President Julius Maada Bio’s national development agenda, particularly the Free Quality School Education programme and the Feed Salone initiative.
He said Sierra Leone had made a significant commitment to education by expanding access to schooling and placing human capital development at the centre of national policy.
“But once we made that bet on education, we also had to bet on feeding children in school,” he said. “And once we commit to feeding children in school, we must confront the bigger national question: can we feed our own country?”
According to Minister Bah, Free Quality School Education invests in the knowledge and potential of Sierra Leone’s children, while Feed Salone seeks to strengthen the country’s productive capacity, create employment and improve food security.
He argued that school feeding should therefore not be treated as a stand-alone social programme, but as an intervention connected to education, agriculture, nutrition, youth employment, local enterprise and national self-reliance.
Minister Bah noted that Sierra Leone has a young population, with a median age of about 19, while more than 55 percent of the country’s land is arable and close to 60 percent of the population is engaged in some form of agriculture.
“These are not disconnected facts,” he said. “We have millions of young people who need opportunities, farmers who need reliable markets and children who need nutritious meals. Properly designed, these are not three separate problems. They can become one integrated solution.”
He said locally sourced school meals could create reliable markets for farmers while generating opportunities for young people across the agricultural value chain, including production, processing, aggregation, transportation, technology and entrepreneurship.
The Minister also connected school feeding to Sierra Leone’s national civic education agenda, explaining that Feed Salone is the second pillar of the National Civic Education Strategy, built around the message: “Grow what we eat. Eat what we grow.”
He said the message goes beyond agriculture and reflects the role citizens can play in national development.
“When a young Sierra Leonean grows food, builds an agribusiness, chooses locally produced rice or develops technology that connects farmers to schools, that is not only economic activity. It is civic action,” he said.
Concluding his intervention, Minister Bah said Sierra Leone’s approach could be summed up in one national ambition: “We bet on education. So we had to feed children in school. Now we must bet on feeding the country and we must do it locally.”
He added that locally produced school meals could help keep children in school, provide farmers with reliable markets, create opportunities for young people and strengthen national confidence.
“The school meal is where our investment in the child meets our belief in ourselves as a country,” he said.