Feeding for the future

The primary school at Achada Furna lies high up in the hills of the Cape Verde island of Fogo. Local families live mainly off agriculture, selling vegetables, livestock and cheese. If there is a surplus, farmers may give it to the school, making their own contribution to a long-running meals-for-school children programme run by the UN World Food Programme (WFP). Head teacher Vanda Lucia Alves, 26, is used to overseeing meal breaks as well as lessons. Every morning and afternoon dozens of children aged between six and 14 file into the school canteen for a meal of rice and bean stew. Sometimes this is supplemented by canned meat. Alves said these free meals were vital for keeping kids in school. "The financial conditions faced by people living in this area simply don’t make it possible to provide good food at home. You will often find children arriving here hungry," she told IRIN. Alves stressed that well-fed children also perform considerably better in class. "They are brighter, much more alert. You can see a clear difference once they have eaten," she said. The WFP provides the food for free and meals are dished out in over 450 primary and pre-primary schools in the Cape Verde Islands, an arid archipelago of volcanic islands that protrude from the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of West Africa. In a country with a very modest agricultural base, heavily dependent on expensive food imports, the free meals service has proved critical in boosting school enrolment. Cape Verde now has close to a 100 per cent primary school attendance record, amongst the best in sub-Saharan Africa. With 40 per cent of the population under 14, Cape Verde has had to invest heavily in education, trying also to ensure equal access to schooling for girls and boys. Teachers say they are happy to see classrooms full, but warn that conditions are still extremely difficult. "There are still many things here that are not as they should be," said Alcides Andrade Mendes, the young head teacher of the primary school at Monte Grande, another village on Fogo. "The condition of the building is one concern. Then there are the teaching materials. We have a long way to go." Cape Verde’s Education Minister, Victor Borges, makes no secret of the difficulties ahead and admits that Cape Verde has used "unorthodox" solutions in order to ensure that every child gets at least some schooling. The government has rented buildings to use as extra classrooms and packed in two or even three shifts per day at each school and has employed under-qualified teachers, but, said Borges, "all with the objective of leaving no child outside the school system". In the 1980s, Cape Verde set a target of four years mandatory school attendance for every child on the nine inhabited islands in the archipelago. That was pushed up to six years in the 1990s. But Borges has warned that a generalised access to education must be combined with an increase in quality. While there is now a widespread acceptance of the importance of education in Cape Verde, the tragedy is that school-leavers find no job opportunities awaiting them and most long for a chance to emigrate to Europe or the United States. Fifteen years ago Veronica Maria Lopes Tavarez, known to friends and family as ‘Vera’, featured in a WFP video on school feeding programmes as a six-year-old. Now aged 21, Vera has spent the past three years at home in the village of Sao Domingos Pinha on Santiago island, waiting in vain for a scholarship or grant to get into higher education. Vera does not regret the years she spent studying, nor does she resent the good fortune of other school-friends who have gone on to study in Portugal and Brazil. "They had money and we don’t," she explained in a resigned manner. Her family lives off the land, selling a few basic crops and raising livestock. Youth unemployment in Sao Domingos, as elsewhere in Cape Verde, is high. Vera says she would prefer to have a job now than wait to go to college. "I have seen what my family needs and that is the best way I can help them," she said.