The Effect of the New Food Policy on Students’ Welfare in Makerere University

Abstract

With the change of the food policy from provision of meals to students by service providers at the various halls of residence to provision of food allowances to government sponsored students in Makerere University, students had to adopt new strategies to help them acquire their meals. The new food policy requires that students are given Shs.535,000 per semester to cater for their meals. Therefore the main objective of the study was to find out the effect of this new food policy on the welfare of students by assessing the strategies students have adopted in regards to this new policy and the factors associated with the choice of their strategies. Descriptive statistics were used to find out the choice of adaptive strategy of students. It also employed the chi-square test to test the relationship between the independent variables (gender, age, hall of residence supplementary finances, type of meals consumed, eating frequency of students, year of study, the number of students in a room of residence and birth order) and the outcome variable (choice of adaptive strategy). This was done in order to find out the factors associated with the choice of adaptive strategy. However due to the variability in choice of adaptive strategy within the halls of residence, a multilevel logistic regression model was used to establish the factors responsible for the variability in the adaptive strategies within the halls of residence. And a sample of 300 students was used for the analysis. Results from the analysis indicated that most of the students chose to acquire their meals through either cooking or buying food which is very expensive given the current cost of living around the university. The findings further indicated that the factors associated with the choice of adaptive strategy were type of meals consumed and the eating frequency of the student. With regards to the findings of the study, the Government should increase the number of food courts in the university that provide descent meals at subsidized prices in order to ensure that students have proper meals and are also able to spare more time for their academics. Students should also learn how to budget to ensure that the given food allowance helps them acquire the required meals.