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This study investigated parents' involvement in sustaining school-based feeding programme in public secondary schools in Tanzania. Epstein’s model of parental involvement was used as theoretical framework. The study was guided by three specific objectives namely, to explore motives toward parental involvement in supporting SBFP in public secondary schools, to identify ways through which parents are involved in sustaining SBFP in public secondary schools and lastly was to examine challenges facing parental involvement in sustaining SBFP. The study involved 94 participants, comprised of 60 students, six teachers, three heads of school, 3 WEOs, 18 parents, and 3 SBFP chairpersons. The study employed mixed method research approach in collection of data; again, data was collected using questionnaire, interviews, FGD, observation, and documentary review quantitative data were descriptively analyzed with the help of SPSS while qualitative data were analyzed through the thematic analysis. The study findings unveiled that, parent’s involvement in supporting school-based feeding programme had been motivated by various motives such as reducing disturbance for students to travel for long distance to and from school to get lunch at home, improving student attendance, improving the performance of the students, and improving students’ health. The study found that, there were various ways through which parents were being involved to sustaining SBFP, which includes ways related to material support, ways related to managerial support and lastly ways related to financial support. Furthermore, the study findings show that the involvement of parents in SBFP faces a number of challenges such as challenges related to socio-cultural factors, challenges related to policy, challenges related to poor economic-base of the parents, and challenges related to institutional factors. The study recommended that the government through the district council should impose by-laws to all public secondary schools to encourage parents to participate in supporting the SBFP. In addition, the government through the President’s Office Regional Administrative and Local Government (PoRALG) should improve the school infrastructure such as kitchens, stores, water supply and to encourage parents to support the SBFP by contributing raw food and cash to support the programme for the benefit of their children and the community at large. |
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