The World Food Programme (WFP) is to provide 482,000 Ghanaians with food aid through 2005 to support efforts to reduce poverty in Ghana, the UN agency announced on Wednesday. WFP's Ghana Country Programme, designed in close collaboration with the Ghanaian government, will supply beneficiaries with 35,000 mt of food over the next four years. Linked to projects run by other UN agencies and NGOs, it covers community health and nutrition education, girls' education and savannah resource management and is budgeted at US $15.3 million. Another US $4.7 million will be requested for HIV/AIDS programmes, WFP said.

Under one of the programme's three projects, food will be provided for malnourished pre-school children attending community health and nutrition centres. Food will also be given to expectant and nursing mothers to encourage them to attend health and nutrition classes.

A second project will offer some 29,600 girls a monthly take-home ration of cereals and oil in return for attending school. This project will be carried out in rural areas in Ghana's northern savannahs, where, WFP said, only 62 percent of girls and 67 percent of boys are enrolled in primary schools, which is much lower than the national average. "Take-home rations have proved an extremely effective way of ensuring attendance, and therefore improving performance," WFP Ghana Country Director Eva Hodell said.

WFP said the third initiative would focus on farmers, 58 percent of whom do not have enough food to feed their families because of recurrent drought, reduced soil fertility and high population growth, according to recent studies. These families, who are mainly in the north, endure the worst food shortages between March and August each year. Under the project, farmers will receive food as an incentive to invest their time and resources in adopting new forestry management practices such as developing tree and plant nurseries, agro-forestry plantations and soil and water structures, WFP said.