Austerity is impeding children’s education: A qualitative study of the associations of food insecurity and school engagement in Ghana

Abstract

The latest round of fiscal austerity in Ghana has meant that the feeding rate paid to the service providers of Ghana’s school feeding programme is both frozen and unrealistically low. Accordingly, service providers adopt discretionary coping strategies. This qualitative case study, therefore, explores the impacts of austerity on children’s school engagement. Relying on semi-structured interviews with school children in two public primary schools, as well as two focus group discussions with the teachers in both schools, the study shows how the discretionary coping strategies adopted by the service providers impact school children’s food security, which might lead to disinterest in classroom activities and increases in absenteeism and truancy.

Introduction

Ghana implemented its school feeding programme in 2005 as the country’s flagship social intervention programme. The broad objectives of the programme are (a) improving school enrolment, attendance and retention of pupils in deprived areas, (b) enhancing the health and nutrition of pupils and (c) boosting local agricultural production (Government of Ghana, 2015). Ghana’s school feeding programme is implemented using the caterer model of service delivery. Through the caterer model, service delivery contracts are awarded to private sector providers on a pre-finance basis. That is, the service providers purchase, process and deliver foods to pupils in select schools, at a feeding rate per head determined by the government. As a publicly funded programme, the government of Ghana determines the schools in which the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) is implemented. The basis of selecting beneficiary schools is the rate of school dropout and level of literacy in the locality, level of school attendance, the poverty status of the districts and gender parity index (World Food Programme, 2007). The service providers are not paid directly for delivering the programme, they make their margins on the feeding rate paid per head.

Following its implementation, the Ghana school feeding programme has chalked significant successes. For instance, the Netherlands Development Organisation SNV reports that between 2005 and 2011, the programme witnessed an annual average enrolment increase of 18%; during the 2013/2014 academic year, the Ghana school feeding programme experienced a 320.6% increase in enrolment, compared to the 2006/2007 academic year when the programme commenced (SNV Netherlands Development Organisation, 2014).

While these are an impressive record of achievement, challenges and sustainability threats remain. Starting in 2013, Ghana’s economy slumped. The following year, the country’s president in an interview with Al-Jazeera about Ghana’s economy argued: ‘There are some things that you have to do when you are faced with economic challenges . . . and it involves austerity . . . you must be prepared to pay any price to ensure that the economy of your country is returned to stability and growth’ (Talk to Al-Jazeera, 2014). Subsequently, the government of Ghana in 2015 implemented fiscal austerity as a condition for a $918 million bailout from the IMF (Minister of Finance, 2015). Austerity has meant significant cutbacks of public spending. For instance, in an attempt to reduce budget deficits, some statutory payments were in arrears spanning several months between 2015 and 2016. Government transfers to the District Assembly Common Fund (DACF), the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) and the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) were in arrears (see GraphicOnline, 2014; Modern Ghana, 2013; National Health Insurance Scheme, 2015). The impact of austerity in Ghana also played out in the introduction of revenue mobilisations schemes such as an increase in Value Added Tax, a 20% Import Duty, a Special Import Levy of 2% and a National Fiscal Stabilization Levy of 5% profit before tax on banking and insurance industries (Minister of Finance, 2014).

In terms of the Ghana school feeding programme, the author’s 2019 doctoral study (see Mohammed, 2019) shows how the government’s austerity programme has had significant funding challenges for the country’s school feeding programme. Specifically, a regime of fiscal austerity has meant that the feeding rate paid to the service providers have been frozen at an unrealistically low rate for more than a year, in a country context of continually rising inflation and cost of living. For instance, between 2012 and 2014, inflation rose from 8.8% to 17.0%, impacting the cost of food and non-food items (Molini and Pierella, 2015). A climate of austerity has further meant that during periods of reimbursement, the service providers are not reimbursed the full amount owed to them, creating reimbursement arrears spanning up to 1 year after service delivery.

As a response to these financial challenges, the service providers have adopted a host of unsanctioned mechanisms. Some of the unsanctioned coping mechanisms adopted by the service providers to deal with the resource constraints include reducing the quantity of meals served to the pupils, ignoring the service delivery menu and in place of it, delivering cheaper to prepare meals, discriminating between younger and older children, and skipping the service delivery on some days (see Anonymised). What these coping strategies mean for children’s school engagement, is the object of this paper. In other words, the paper aims to investigate the impact of austerity on children’s education, by focusing on how food insecurity impacts children’s school engagement. The article is divided into four sections. The next section reviews the literature on food insecurity and school engagement. It is then followed by a discussion of the research methods employed in this study. Subsequently, the findings are presented and discussed.

Understanding food security and school engagement

Worldwide, food insecurity understood as ‘limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire food in socially acceptable ways’ (Hamilton et al., 1997: 50) is a pressing human development challenge. Food insecurity is experienced when people report instances of consuming a diet of poor nutritional quality, food of insufficient quantity, anxiety over the lack of food and the resort to social networks to meet nutritional needs (Connell et al., 2005; Jones et al., 2013; Smith et al., 2006; Vargas and Penny, 2010).

Although all people might be vulnerable to food insecurity, food insecurity is especially harmful to children. Comparatively, children are more susceptible to food insecurity challenges because they are dependent on adults for their needs, and due to their incomplete cognitive development (Bernal et al., 2012; Ke and Ford-Jones, 2015; Vozoris and Tarasuk, 2003). Furthermore, the effects of hunger on children are irreversible, as food insecurity undermines children’s intellectual and physical growth, and school attendance (Belachew et al., 2011). A quarter of children under 5 years are physically stunted – that is, children whose height are low for their age – impacting both their cognitive abilities and academic performance (Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO], 2017; Winicki and Jemison, 2003).

As already noted, a key goal of Ghana’s school feeding programme is to improve child nutrition and reduce child hunger. The underlying motivation for this goal is the known negative impacts of food insecurity on children’s education. The vast body of food security research provides evidence that food insecurity is negatively associated with academic performance. In the USA, Alaimo et al.’s (2001a) cross-sectional study found that children in food-insecure households scored lower in reading and maths than children from food-secure households. Similarly, Esfandiari et al.’s (2018) cross-sectional study show that food insecurity in Tehran impaired academic performance in all subjects. Food insecurity impedes academic performance through its impact on learning (Ashiabi and O’Neal, 2008), or school engagement (Belachew et al., 2011; Winicki and Jemison, 2003).

School engagement: A brief review

Concerns about low academic performance and high school dropout rates have led educationists and policy analysts to formulate various concepts as a way of exploring and explaining these barriers to academic excellence. Hailed as a potent antidote to low academic performance and high school dropout rates (Fredricks et al., 2004), school engagement is one of the theoretical constructs that is used to explore academic low performance. School engagement is explained as students’ participation in classroom and school activities (Ashiabi, 2005). More broadly, school engagement is a multifaceted construct that spans three interrelated concepts: cognitive engagement, emotional engagement and behavioural engagement (Fredricks et al., 2004).

Behavioural engagement is understood as students’ active participation and involvement in classroom and school activities, such as completing assigned tasks (Engels et al., 2016; Finn, 1993; Murray et al., 2004). Emotional engagement, on the other hand, is students’ commitment and optimism towards their school in general, as well as their feelings towards their colleagues and teachers (Murray et al., 2004; Skinner et al., 2009). Finally, students are seen to be cognitively engaged in school when they are actively involved in the learning and thought process by analysing and synthesising information in the classroom and school (Murray et al., 2004). Taking these three components together, students are said to be engaged in school when they: pay attention in class, complete school and classroom tasks, do not engage in disruptive behaviour, are not truant, are not exhibiting internalising and externalising behavioural challenges such as withdrawal and anxiety (Murray et al., 2004).

Examining and exploring students’ level school engagement is critical, in part because it has a direct and indirect impact on learning achievement and academic performance in the classroom (Dotterer and Lowe, 2011). At the very least, ‘effective learning requires attentiveness, time on task, persistence, interactions, and reflection’ (Murray et al., 2004: 7), which are all characteristics of engaged students. For instance, Furrer and Skinner (2003) note that engaged students are more likely to excel academically, and less likely to drop out of school (Johnson et al., 2001). Thus, the degree to which students are engaged plays a critical role in enhancing their learning achievement (Chen, 2008; Dalun et al., 2011; Fredricks et al., 2004). In other words, school engagement is a predictor of academic performance (Sirin and Rogers-Sirin, 2004).

Whereas many studies on children’s school engagement exist, school engagement is usually explored as an end in and of itself (Ashiabi, 2005). This author is not aware of any study that has explored the implication of food insecurity for children’s school engagement in the Ghanaian context. Given the foregoing, this paper examines the impact of austerity (manifested in food insecurity in school) on children’s school engagement in northern Ghana.

Methods

The data used in this paper is an extract from the author’s 2019 doctoral study (see Mohammed, 2019) which sought to, among other things, understand the implications of fiscal austerity for the implementation of the Ghana school feeding programme and children’s education. As a qualitative case study, the data sources for the thesis were semi-structured in-depth interviews with the service providers of the Ghana school feeding programme, expert stakeholders, headteachers, caregivers and primary school children; focus group discussions with school staff; and, naturalistic observations in two public primary schools in northern Ghana.

This paper, however, is based on the following data: one-one semi-structured interviews with primary school children aged 8–15, and focus group discussions with the school staff in both schools. The field sites for this study were two public schools in northern Ghana (one situated in a rural area and the other in an urban area). In presenting the findings, the extracts from the students are labelled ‘urban’ or ‘rural’, signifying which of the two schools that particular student was interviewed in.

Semi-structured interviews and focus group discussion were the main methods of data collection. First, semi-structured interviewing was used as a data collection method since the objective of the study was to seek an in-depth understanding of the phenomena of austerity and food insecurity from the participants’ perspective (Bryman, 2008). Semi-structured interviews were also chosen as the flexibility of interviews allowed the researcher to probe further based on the responses received from participants, in an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of respondents (Gray, 2014).

Children are an important group in this research because the author agrees that children are competent social agents who actively interact with and shape events around them (James and Prout, 1997; Morrow, 2008; Punch, 2002). Furthermore, as Article 12 of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child affirms, children have the right to freely express their views in all matters affecting them. Against this backdrop, the researcher decided to engage the children directly in one-on-one semi-structured interviews rather than relying on adult proxies or using innovative methods of data collection (such as drawings and pictures) when researching with children. Furthermore, as Punch (2002) argues, when researching with children, the use of standard methods such as semi-structured interviews might have the advantage of treating children as competent social actors who are not patronised. Similarly, in this research, interviewing children proved invaluable, judging by the depth of their responses (which are presented and discussed below). The children were able to discuss in-depth their experiences and perceptions of food insecurity and its impacts on their education.

Focus group discussion was the other data collection method for the second category of respondents – the teachers. Bryman (2008) sees focus group discussions basically as a group interview where a few people of usually 8–10 (Mack et al., 2005) come together to discuss an issue bearing in mind the theme under discussion (Bryman, 2008; Punch, 2005). In each of the two schools, the researcher organised a focus group discussion with the teaching staff. Through the focus group discussions, the teachers shared and compared their experiences about the implementation of the GSFP in general and children’s experiences of food insecurity in their classrooms. Focus group discussions as a data collection method offered the moderator (the researcher) the opportunity to have a broad understanding of what food insecurity means to children in school. Further, it offered the researcher the opportunity to verify and confirm the responses and experiences of the children.

In all, 21 children took part in the research (11 from the urban school and 10 in the rural school), in addition to the two focus group discussions. The focus group discussion in the urban school had eight teachers as participants, while that of the rural school had seven teachers.

Access to the teachers and pupils were sought from two levels. First, an introductory letter was sent to the Regional Directorate of Education of the Ghana Education Service explaining the research’s objectives and requesting clearance to research in the two selected primary schools in northern Ghana. Having secured the clearance from the Regional Director of Education, another introductory letter was sent to the headteachers of the two schools, requesting access to research in their respective schools. The headteachers of both schools eventually granted the researcher access, after some initial back and forth. In each of the two schools, the headteachers organised a meeting for the researcher to interact with the school staff, teachers, service providers and pupils. These meetings were to inform the participants about the research objectives, solicit for volunteers to participate and why their participation was important to the research. The teachers were subsequently invited to attend the focus group discussions, after supplying the necessary information leaflet to them. Regarding the pupils, they were addressed in their classrooms, informing them about the research objectives and aims and why their participation was solicited. They were then asked to volunteer to participate. Those who volunteered were then given information and consent letters to be sent to their parents and guardians. A later date was set for both the one-on-one interviews with the pupils and focus group discussions. All participants signed consent forms, agreeing to have the interviews and focus group discussions audiotaped. These audiotapes were transcribed verbatim and analysed thematically, following Spencer et al.’s (2014) four broad steps; familiarisation with the data; constructing an initial thematic framework; using this framework to sort and index the data; and, reviewing data extracts for coherence and consistency. In both the data analysis and presentation of findings, the data are anonymised to ensure confidentiality.

Findings and discussions

Following on from the introductory discussions, due to the political climate of fiscal austerity in Ghana, the service providers of the country’s school feeding programme face significant resource constraints. Accordingly, they adopt several unsanctioned coping strategies such as compromising the quality of meals served (by delivering poorer quality diet or serving cheaper to prepare diets in disregard of the service delivery menu), reducing meal portion sizes and skipping service delivery on several days (see Anonymised). These coping strategies have a direct impact on children’s levels of school engagement and academic performance. The analysis of the data shows that the pathways through which food insecurity impacts children’s school engagement are through a) Disinterest in Classroom Activities and b) Truancy and Absenteeism. These themes are presented and discussed below.

Disinterest in classroom activities

This theme discusses the children’s narrated experiences of food insecurity, and its impact on their ability to concentrate in class. While narrating their experiences of food insecurity, the pupils described how, being food insecure in school, had severe impacts on their health. Consider these narrations:

[When we are hungry] In class, we don’t study well. Sometimes, when we are hungry, we get a headache (Boy, 12-year-old, Urban).

When you are hungry, your stomach will be paining you (Boy, 13-year-old Rural).

When I am hungry, I feel weak. When I go to class, I get stomach pains (Boy, 12-year-old, Rural).

What these extracts above suggest is that being food insecure in school can lead to feelings of tiredness, weakness, headaches and stomach aches. More importantly, the pupils reported that these instances of sickness and weakness affect their academic performance, as they become disinterested in classroom tasks. They argued that:

When I am hungry, I don’t pay attention in class. I just sit quietly in class like I am not there [in class] (Girl, 12-year-old, Urban).

When I eat that small food, my body becomes weak. My stomach will be paining me in class, and I cannot concentrate very well (Boy, 10-year-old, Urban).

When the teacher is teaching me, I don’t participate. I will feel pains. Sometimes I feel stomach pains (Boy, 12-year-old, Rural).

These extracts clearly show that children’s level of engagement in the classroom can be associated with their state of hunger. According to the students, when they are hungry, they either cannot concentrate as Boy, 10-year-old, Urban notes, or they cannot participate in classroom activities (Boy, 12-year-old, Rural). These findings are consistent with the food insecurity research. The household food insecurity literature shows that food-insecure children are significantly more likely to experience poorer health status through frequent stomach and headaches than children from food-secure households (Alaimo et al., 2001b; Vozoris and Tarasuk, 2003; Weinreb et al., 2002).

Generally, the responses from the students suggested that their disengagement from classroom activities because of hunger seemed like a regular phenomenon. Accordingly, during the focus group discussions, the teachers were asked to reflect on their experiences, if any, of children’s disengagement from classroom activities, and the reasons accounting for that in their view. Pupils’ lack of concentration and attentiveness were flagged by the teachers as the main predictors of children’s classroom disengagement and non-participation. According to the teachers, hungry pupils in their classes found it challenging to engage in classroom activities, as they were dull, bored and lethargic. Discussing in-depth their experiences in dealing with hungry children in their classrooms, the teachers narrated that:

When you are talking [teaching in class], they will not even mind you . . . If you ask them [a] question, they are just down [disengaged]. They are not willing to respond to what you are doing. Even when you give exercise, they feel reluctant to [do it] because of the hunger. You see them yawning (Teacher 7, Focus Group Discussion Rural).

They [pupils] can’t concentrate when you are teaching them after the first period [morning session]. Even sometimes they [the service provider] can prepare the food, and by 1 pm [even when the caterer provides the service], they [the pupils] will be hungry again because the food sometimes [served to them] will be very small. The quantity is too small (Teacher 3, Focus Group Discussion Urban).

They will be beterr [lethargic] in class, lying on their desks. It’s because of hunger. They can no more [longer] concentrate . . .. When . . . you are teaching, they are then lying down or sleeping. [They say] That madam I am hungry (Teacher 4, Focus Group Discussion Urban).

Inferring from the teachers’ and pupils’ extracts presented so far, it is clear that food insecurity is negatively associated with children’s academic performance. Food insecurity, arising out of the service providers coping mechanisms, impacts the pupils’ ability and willingness to engage in classroom activities. Instead of focusing on what they are being taught, the pupils note that they lose interest in classroom activities because they are hungry. The children’s disengagement from classroom activities is manifested in their internalising behaviour challenges such as becoming withdrawn, quiet and isolated from the class ‘like I am not there [in class]’ (Girl, 12-year-old, Urban). These findings align with other studies (Pollitt et al., 1996; Reid, 2000; Slopen et al., 2010; Strupp and Levitsky, 1995) that have also confirmed that hunger drains the energy levels of children, leading to internalising behaviour problems such as apathy, passivity, withdrawal and fatigue.

Furthermore, some of the hungry students completely ignored their teachers in class. As Teacher 7, Rural above puts it, ‘When you are talking [teaching in class], they will not even mind you. Even when you give exercise, they feel reluctant to [do it] because of the hunger.’ It is important to note that although the pupils were sometimes food insecure because the service providers had skipped providing the meals, the pupils were mainly food insecure because the food served to them was of inadequate quantity, as Boy, 10-year-old Urban and Teacher 3, Focus Group Discussion Urban note respectively: ‘When I eat that small food, my body becomes weak’ and ‘they [the pupils] will be hungry again because the food sometimes [served to them] will be very small’.

While the context of this research is food insecurity in schools and not household food insecurity, nonetheless, the findings herein reflect the conclusions of household food insecurity and academic performance. The common theme in both contexts is hunger impacting pupils’ ability to engage with classroom activities. Due to experiences of hunger in the classroom, pupils in this were disinterested in classroom activities. Both the pupils and teachers recounted instances of pupils’ disengagement with classroom activities by sleeping, yawning, feeling tiredness, complaints of stomach and headaches, as well as displaying internalising behaviour problems such as withdrawal and isolation in class.

Although this study did not conduct standardised tests to measure the extent to which these challenges directly affect pupils’ academic performance, relying on the household food insecurity studies referenced above, it can be argued that students who are disengaged from classroom activities (exhibiting symptoms of tiredness, weakness and lethargy) might have lower academic performance since school engagement impacts academic performance (Dotterer and Lowe, 2011). The implications of students’ disengagement from classroom activities are not hard to imagine; when pupils are too hungry to learn, there is an impact on their academic performance. For, ‘effective learning requires attentiveness, time on task, persistence, interactions, and reflection’ (Murray et al., 2004, p. 7). If pupils are hungry and beterr [lethargic] (Teacher 4, Focus Group Discussion Urban), withdrawn (Teacher 7, Focus Group Discussion Rural) and apathetic (Girl, 12-year-old, Urban), these internalising behaviour problems undercut their ability to participate in classroom tasks (Ashiabi and O’Neal 2008).

Truancy and absenteeism

Feelings of tiredness, headaches and apathy were not the only ways by which food-insecure pupils disengaged from classroom activities. Some pupils resisted going to school altogether. They either did not come to school if the service provider did not turn up on that day, or they left school in search of food if the food served to them were of inadequate quantity. Some of the students noted that:

The day that she [service provider] comes to school, you will see smoke going up from the kitchen even when you are at home, so I go [to school] (Girl, 12-year-old Rural).

When she comes to school, you can see her people [workers] on campus (Boy, 11-year-old Rural).

The pupils devised ways of telling if the service provider had come to school to deliver the meals each day. In the morning, they would look towards the kitchen to see if billows of smoke rose into the air (signifying the availability of the caterer as they cook with firewood). Girl, 12-year-old Rural’s decision to go to school or not, depended on whether she saw smoke ‘going up from the kitchen’.

On the other hand, for some of the pupils, even when they attended school because they were sure the service provider would deliver the service, they sometimes left school in search of food if they were not satisfied (both in terms of quantity and quality) with the meals served. Consequently, truancy and absenteeism were a significant challenge to children’s classroom engagement. The pupils explained why they left school or did not attend school at all on some days as:

When she [service provider] does not come [to school], I just sit in the class [during lunchtime]. Sometimes I leave the school and go home for food. Sometimes I come back when [the] break [time] is over. Sometimes I will just stay there [out of school] (Boy, 11-year-old Rural).

I will go home and eat [When the service provider does not come to school]. I go home sometimes and sometimes I won’t come back [to school] (Girl, 10-year-old, Rural).

Break time I go to my mother in the farm. She get [has] food there. The place [farm] is far so sometimes I don’t come back [to school] (Boy, 10-year-old Rural).

What these extracts confirm, is that on days when the service provider skips delivering the service, or indeed when the pupils are hungry (because they do not like the quality of the food, or that the quantity served is not enough for them), some of them leave school in search of food. But more crucially, in most cases, the pupils who leave school in search of food do not return to school partly because the ‘place [farm] is far [from the school]’ (Boy, 10-year-old, Rural).

It is important to note that the teachers were generally sympathetic to the pupils’ food insecure situation (in part because the teachers themselves could not personally solve the nutrition needs of the pupils). Accordingly, the teachers granted permission to the students who claimed they wanted to go home and eat. Indeed, sometimes, the teachers themselves asked the pupils to go home (without the pupils asking). The teachers narrated the following:

When they are hungry, some of them will come and tell you they want to go home [for food]. What can you do? You just have to let them go home because you don’t want them crying about headache, stomach aches or be beterr [lethargic] in class (Teacher 5, Focus Group Discussion Rural).

. . . Some of the students when . . . they are hungry, they know that an auntie’s house is closer [to the school] and there will be food there. Before you realise, he comes to ask for permission to go and urinate. Then he goes out with the reason to urinate. Ah, after some time you are not seeing the person [pupil]. You trace [go to the urinary], and he’s not there (Teacher 6, Focus Group Discussion Urban).

If you don’t have [food] to give [the student] and the child is beterr [lethargic], so [you] ask the child to go home because they are many and you cannot be buying food for them or giving [all of] them money (Teacher 6, Focus Group Discussion Rural).

Faced with the reality of hungry and disengaged pupils in their classrooms, the teachers allow the pupils to leave school in search of food. When one considers the fact that the pupils do not attend school when the service provider skips service delivery, absenteeism and truancy, therefore, become contributory factors to students’ disengagement from classroom activities, with potential deleterious impacts on their academic performance. For, students must not only be interested in classroom activities to show that they are engaged with school activities, but they must also, of course, be present in school.

Some studies have demonstrated the negative impacts of hunger on children’s education through high rates of absenteeism. Absenteeism impacts children’s academic performance as, for example, hungry pupils are more likely to be absent from school (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2005). Bernal et al.’s (2014) research arrived at a similar conclusion. In Venezuela, they realised that pupils from food-insecure households were associated with high absentee rates, as they roamed about in search of food (Bernal et al., 2014). Similarly, the findings in this study affirm the conclusions arrived at by these studies. Hungry pupils refused to come to school, walked out of school, or they asked for permission from their teachers to leave school in search of food. It is to be expected that hungry pupils will be disinterested in classroom activities, or any other activities for that matter. Pupils abandoning school in search of food, suggest that these pupils were not engaged in any serious academic work, at least for the period that they are not in school.

Concluding remarks

The paper started with a goal to demonstrate how a regime of austerity in Ghana impacts children’s education, through the lens of classroom engagement. As a way of coping with the resource constraints that define their service delivery, the service providers have had to adopt a host of unsanctioned coping strategies. The inevitable corollary of the resort to unsanctioned coping mechanisms has been a significant impact on children’s classroom engagement. Accordingly, the study has highlighted how food insecurity affects pupils’ behavioural engagement, as pupils are too hungry to learn, and subsequently disinterested in classroom activities.

The overall importance of this paper is its demonstration of how austerity is silently undermining children’s education in northern Ghana. The GSFP was conceived as a potent development policy to help build the human capital base of the country by attracting children to school. By addressing children’s nutrition and education needs, it is hoped that the future human capital base of the country is assured. Nevertheless, the paper has shown that austerity is undermining these goals through the provision of compromised quality of food or food of inadequate quantity. Consequently, teaching and learning become ineffective as children either become completely disinterested in classroom activities or truant, both of which undermine the goals of the GSFP. Therefore, if children are to grow into productive adults, then fiscal austerity is dealing a mortal blow to the long-term ambition of building the country’s human resource base. The findings in this paper provide an empirical basis for both scholarly attention and public policy responses towards addressing the negative impacts of austerity on children’s education in northern Ghana.

Another finding of the paper is that it reinforces the ongoing debates about children’s agency and the notion that they are competent social actors who can understand and shape the world around them. Interviewing children produced powerful narrations and imagery about how school children in northern Ghana take conscious decisions to navigate the challenges of their daily lives in school. This rich data from the children might not have been possible if the author had relied on adult proxies rather than speaking to the children directly. In this regard, the paper finds, in agreement with Article 12 of the UNCRC that children should be encouraged to voice out their experiences and concerns, particularly in matters affecting them.

Finally, while the paper has the foregoing important implications for policy and practice, it has weaknesses too. In particular, a weakness of this paper is that it is a small study confined to two schools in the northern region of Ghana. Further studies on a wider scale might paint a more comprehensive picture of the extent to which austerity impacts children’s education in Ghana.