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TV3’s Keminni Amanor calls out Gender Ministry over AI to monitor school feeding App

Published

10 months ago

August 11, 2024

Vida Essel-Lamptey

TV3’s Keminni Amanor calls out Gender Minister over AI App to monitor school feeding

Season journalist Keminni Nyamanni Amanor has called out the Gender Ministry over its decision to use artificial intelligence (AI) tool to monitor the quality of food serve by caterers under the school feeding programme.

According to her such Apps only indicate the nutritional value of the food and not its quality adding that the nutritional value does not necessarily translate into quality.

She is of the view, the resources being directed into the App, must be channeled rather to the caterers to enable them provide the quality the programme they sort to achieve.

Ms Amanor made the comment on GhanaTonight on TV3 on Friday, August 9, 2024 while sitting in for the substantive host, Mr Afred Ocansey.

“………these Apps do not tell you the quality of the food that have been cooked. If you put rice and stew on the App, the App is going to tell you that the rice and stew has this amount of protein value, the rice has this amount of carbohydrate value but it does not tell you that the tomatoes was unwholesome or not and that is the difference and so instead of seeing this as a simplistic matter, perhaps we could spend the money we spending on the App, give it to the women and let them cook wholesome food for the children,” she said.

“I just want to reiterate, we need to priorities in this country. We cannot invest in an App to monitor an exercise or a programme we fail to pay timeously on. We failing to pay enough for the women to cook because you know what? that App won’t tell us if there were weevils or other insect in the rice before it was cooked. It won’t tell us where the tomatoes came from, whether they were rotten. It won’t tell us whether the food was smelly, it will give us the nutritional value but that does not translate into quality,” Ms Amanor lamented.

“How much are we spending on that App, the Minister for Gender and Social Protection should be telling us that. How much are we spending on that? Couldn’t that be have been wired into other areas to ensure that those women get enough money to cook quality food and then we an enhance monitoring. Monitoring an exercise that is broken is not enough,”.

Ghana to use AI to monitor quality of meals serve by school feeding caterer

The Minister for Gender and Social Protection, Dakoa Newman at a press conference in Accra on Friday August 9, said government will from next academic term, 2024/ 2025 use AI tool to monitor the quality of food serve by caterers under the school feeding programme.

The App she said will help monitor the nutritional value of meals serve by caterers under the programme.

Again it will give the ministry firsthand information on how to improve the programme to ensure Ghanaian children have access to nutritional foods.

She explained the App will determine the nutritional value of the foods served just by placing pictures of the foods on it.

“The App helps you to determine the nutritional value of the food because when you take a picture, the App gives you breakdown of how nutritious the food is so creating this online system also deals with the nutritional issues that have come to be over the period where people could look at the food and say they don’t think the children are getting the right or balance diet from the food being serve so that will give us a clear indication and whatever the ministry needs to do to ensure that these caterers are cooking food that is nutritious for our dear children to eat,” she further explained.

Source: GhanaPlus.com