UN promotes school-feeding in campaign against poverty

The World Food Programme (WFP) is increasingly lending its weight to the global fight against poverty. Centre stage is its plan to expand its support for school-feeding projects in the developing world, making the provision of a daily meal an integral part of a new campaign aimed at increasing school enrolment and ensuring that the world’s undernourished children are educated. Poor families often do not have enough food at home to provide members with regular meals. Children commonly go to school on an empty stomach, making it difficult for them to concentrate on their lessons or participate in activities. For communities where food security is not assured, chronic low-level malnutrition among children can also result in mental and physical stunting, placing an additional burden on poor nations. Closing the gap between rich and poor Research has shown, however, that basic education is probably the single most effective means to boost ailing economies, increase opportunities for productive employment and create literate, self-reliant and healthy societies. WFP believes that the provision of a single, daily nutritious meal at school is a simple and effective way to attract children to school and to keep them there. Already a familiar part of school life in the western world for nearly 40 years, WFP has been quietly working with a number of donor governments to extend the benefits of school meals to children in poor countries. The largest provider of school meals in the developing world, in 2000 the agency provided meals to more than 12 million school children in 54 countries. The agency says research and years of experience have shown that the provision of school lunches can have an immediate impact on alleviating hunger, as well as helping to increase attendance, improving performance, and ultimately helping to educate many more children. Marking this year's World Food Day, held on October 16, WFP Executive Director Catherine Bertini pointed to school-feeding for the world's undernourished children as an important weapon in the war against hunger and poverty. She called on governments and the humanitarian aid community to join her efforts to create a global programme. "Feeding and educating children are key to closing the gap between rich and poor," she said. There are more than 300 million chronically hungry children in the world today. Some 170 million of them go to school on empty stomachs and do not receive any food during the day, while 130 million do not attend school at all, the majority of them girls. School meals for development and relief In Kenya, where WFP has been providing pre-schools and primary schools with food assistance since 1980, the regular school-feeding programme aims to provide a daily meal to children who would otherwise never attend school. Normally reaching a total of 361,000 children attending 1,362 schools in some of the most arid and food-insecure parts of the country, the programme was expanded dramatically last year as part of the agency's emergency response to a region-wide drought, and it now supplies meals to a total of 1.3 million children in 4,700 schools. The Kenyan school-feeding programme is, according to local aid workers, a prime example of how the approach can be utilised both as a vehicle for addressing a long-term developmental needs as well as to deliver targeted supplementary food assistance during times of crisis. It has also proven effective in increasing the attendance of girls. In the Turkana District of northeastern Kenya, in March 2001 the education ministry said the attendance of girls had increased by 130 percent within one year after the introduction of the programme there. The agency says its Kenya programme has not only provided a clear incentive for children to attend school, the provision of a daily meal also increases attention span and encourages the participation of pupils in school activities. It says there is clear evidence of an improved performance of pupils in their examinations. Students from the arid northeastern districts of the country have consistently performed very well in the Kenya national examinations when competing with students at schools in higher potential areas of the country, WFP says. Keeping schools open in times of crisis It is a positive view that is also shared across the border in neighbouring Ethiopia, where a pilot school-feeding programme was initiated in 1994 by WFP working in conjunction with the Ethiopian education ministry. The project was part of the government's strategy to increase enrolment and reduce school dropout rates in some of the most vulnerable and food-insecure areas of the country. With the country suffering the world's lowest primary education enrolment ratio, only about 20 percent of Ethiopian children entering primary school complete grade six. Extreme poverty, coupled with the debilitating effects of drought and poor health, mean that many parents can ill afford to send their children to school, and dropout rates are very high. At the peak of the drought which hit the region in 2000, many rural schools in the south and southeast of Ethiopia were forced to close when large numbers of students failed to attend. Contributing to the high dropout level was the poverty of parents, many of whom were using their last resources to survive, and could no longer afford to meet the costs of sending their children to school. Another factor was the wholesale migration of families away from their home areas in search of relief assistance. The crisis prompted WFP to accelerate the expansion of the school-feeding programme, which has grown from an initial 80,000 students to the present level of 260,000 pupils in some 600 schools in the Tigray, Amhara, Oromiya, Afar and Somali states. With donations from the governments of Denmark, Italy and the US, the current US $26 million, five-year (1998-2003) programme provides schools with locally-produced, nutrient-rich special foods and high-energy biscuits. In part, the emergency expansion of the school-feeding project in Ethiopia was made possible by virtue of the commitment of additional funds from WFP's Global School-Feeding Initiative (GSFI), a facility recently established to promote its campaign to expand the programme in the developing world and to secure the support of new donors. The WFP programme recently received a boost in the form of a special contribution of US $146 million from the US government's own Global Food for Education Initiative (GFEI), announced by President Clinton at the July 2000 G-8 summit in Okinawa (see: "Towards an international partnership" below). Getting more girls into school While school feeding helps both boy and girl students, special efforts are often needed to get more girls to enter school and improve their attendance. For many impoverished families, rather than attend school, girls are expected to stay in the home to help with domestic chores such as fetching water and cooking meals, or to work long hours on the fields. Even where there is a willingness to reverse the traditional practice and allow girls to attend school, for such families this can represent a considerable economic burden. To help close the gender gap in education, and to reach its aim of providing 50 percent of its education resources within a country to girls, WFP have developed an innovative way of using food aid. In several sub-Saharan countries, as well as in Central Asia, basic food rations are being distributed to families in exchange for the schooling of their daughters. Such "take-home rations" compensate parents for the loss of their daughters' labour and are helping to achieve a fair balance in educational opportunities for both boys and girls. According to the agency, the results of the programme have been impressive. In Niger, at schools with the take-home ration scheme, girls' enrolment increased by 75 percent after the distributions started. In Morocco, the number of girls enrolling in first grade doubled over a two-year period. In one province, where in the early 1990s only one girl in 10 attended school, girls now comprise 43 percent of total primary level enrolment. Sustainability questioned Despite the obvious benefits of school-feeding, some critics question the sustainability of a programme that aims to assist children living in some of the most remote and impoverished regions of the world. They also argue that providing rations to schools that are in dire need of better trained teachers, classrooms, equipment and books is dealing with only one aspect of a larger problem. WFP says it is addressing the issue of sustainability by working in partnership with poor governments to make education a priority and to create the infrastructure, management systems and policies needed to strengthen national educational systems. The low average running cost of school-feeding (19 US cents per child in 2000, inclusive of food, transport, monitoring and management, according to WFP figures) is presented as an additional advantage. Nonetheless, governments are also expected to contribute towards the programme, to gradually increase that contribution and eventually assume full responsibility. More than 12 countries, including Brazil, Namibia, Swaziland, Mauritius and Morocco have "graduated" from WFP school-feeding projects, taking over the operations themselves. The agency also works to build a partnership with parents, teachers and the local community, engaging their support and participation in the preparation of the meals and to provide the services essential for a school-feeding project, including the construction of simple canteens and stores for food and other supplies. In Cote d'Ivoire, school canteens receiving WFP food aid operate largely thanks to parent-teacher associations (PTA). For a school to qualify for the programme, WFP encourages parents to organise an association and then build the necessary kitchen and storeroom. The PTA is then responsible for managing the programme, including the hiring of cooks and helpers. In other countries, WFP says parents often provide fresh vegetables or other ingredients to supplement the rations the agency itself furnishes. Towards an international partnership In its drive to make school-feeding a major pillar of its use of food aid in the fight against poverty, WFP has a major ally in the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Under the US government's GFEI, the USDA is channelling surplus agricultural commodities through WFP and 14 international NGOs to countries which have made commitments to providing universal education for their children. The programme, which is closely linked to WFP's Global School-Feeding Initiative, is part of an effort to achieve the Education for All goals set by the Dakar World Education Forum held in April 2000. At the July 2000 Okinawa summit, Clinton announced that the US would commit resources worth US $300 million to the programme, shipping 680,000 mt of food to support 38 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. It is hoped the programme will allow around 9 million children to receive a regular meal or a take-home ration at school. A major proponent of the idea of an international programme of school lunches and supporter of the GFEI is former US Senator George McGovern. Named as WFP's first Global Ambassador on Hunger by Catherine Bertini on 22 October, McGovern was until his recent retirement, the US Ambassador to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). McGovern was the first director of the US Food for Peace Programme in the early 1960s. In this capacity he was instrumental in founding the WFP. Forty years later, WFP has become the world's largest humanitarian aid organisation. In the wake of the 11 September in the US, the US Congress committed US $40 billion to help support efforts to combat international terrorism. In presenting the keynote speech at the launching of this year's World Food Day, Ambassador McGovern is reported as saying he would be joining forces with fellow national statesman Bob Dole in suggesting that at least US $5 billion of this be used over a five-year period to reduce hunger and ignorance in the world. If the proposal receives support of the administration, McGovern said he would recommend that a major portion of the funds be used to support the GFEI and expand the reach of current school-feeding programmes in the developing world. Such support would be a welcome boost to the WFP campaign, but the agency is also looking to build a wider coalition to achieve the aim of improving the education opportunities for millions of poor children. "Some people exploit ignorance and poor children are the most susceptible," said Catherine Bertini, in a WFP news release issued to mark World Food Day. "World leaders should strongly examine the benefits of school feeding as a simple but effective tool to help exterminate poverty." [ For information on the US government's Global Food for Education initiative, click here For background reading on WFP school-feeding programmes, click here]