Sierra Leone’s Minister of Information and Civic Education, Chernor Bah, has urged governments to view school feeding as part of a wider national investment in education, agriculture, nutrition, youth employment and human-capital development.

Bah made the case at the high-level event School Meals for the Future: Leaders Accelerating Progress, held in New York on September 21, 2026, on the margins of the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly. The gathering was co-hosted by the World Food Programme and The Rockefeller Foundation.

The minister took part in a panel with France’s Minister Delegate for International Partnerships Éléonore Caroit and youth climate educator Sage Lenier. The discussion examined influence, civic action and youth leadership in efforts to address hunger and improve access to education.

Connecting education and food production

Bah linked Sierra Leone’s Free Quality School Education programme with President Dr Julius Maada Bio’s Feed Salone initiative. He said the education programme had expanded access to schooling and put human-capital development at the centre of national policy, while Feed Salone was intended to strengthen the country’s capacity to produce food, create employment and support economic growth.

“But once we made that bet on education, we also had to bet on feeding children in school,” Bah said. “And once we commit to feeding children in school, we must confront the bigger national question: can we feed our own country?”

He said school meals sourced from local production could provide dependable markets for farmers and create employment and business opportunities for young people across the agricultural value chain. Those opportunities, he said, could include farming, processing, aggregation, transport, technology services and entrepreneurship.

Bah said Sierra Leone has about 19 as the median age of its population, while more than 55% of its land is arable and close to 60% of its population is involved in some form of agriculture. The figures were presented by the minister and were qualified in those terms.

School feeding as civic action

According to Bah, Feed Salone is the second pillar of Sierra Leone’s National Civic Education Strategy. He associated the initiative with the message, “Grow what we eat. Eat what we grow,” arguing that the slogan carried a civic as well as an agricultural meaning.

“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.”

Bah also drew on his own experience, saying he had attended school hungry and understood the difficult choices facing families trying to pay for food and transport to school.

“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.

He argued that a locally produced school meal could potentially support several goals at once: keeping a child in school, giving a farmer a reliable market, creating work for a young person and building confidence in Sierra Leone’s domestic production capacity.

“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,” Bah said.

He concluded that school feeding should not be viewed only as a stand-alone social intervention, but as a point where education, agriculture, nutrition, local enterprise, employment and national self-reliance meet.