Food incentives for girl education

Sixteen year-old Waleeda Ahmad Abdullah wakes up before dawn in the morning and walks 10 km to the nearest water source to fetch fresh water for her family. She returns to her home in Al-Hurita, a fishing village of 200 on the Red Sea coast of Yemen, in time to make breakfast for the family and do the rest of her daily chores. Her routine is the same – except on days when school is in session. Then her elder sister does most of the chores so Waleeda can attend school in one of only three brick buildings in the village. The youngest of five sisters, Waleeda hopes to complete her primary education in 2006. Then she plans to study further and become a nurse in the nearest clinic, 15 km away from Al-Hurita. "I will have two years of university and six months in a hospital," she told IRIN. "If money was not the problem, I would become a doctor and not a nurse." Unlike many Yemeni girls of her age, Waleeda says her father, Ahmad, has agreed to let her to make her own decisions about whether to marry or to continue her education and pursue her dreams. According to Waleeda's mother, Fatima Ahmad, her daughter has been motivated to attend school through a school feeding programme initiated by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in Yemen. Food to the rescue WFP officials say their school feeding strategy aims to tackle poverty and hunger in a sustainable way by linking food aid to other chronic issues such as education and gender equity. The programme particularly targets girls whose enrolment rate is half that of boys – in a country where female adult literacy 25 percent, according to the UN Development Programme (UNDP) "Education is the right of every child, not just boys, [moreover] if the mother is educated the whole family is educated," WFP Yemen's deputy country director, Salman Omer, said. Under the programme, a family receives 50 kg of wheat and 3 kg of cooking oil for every three-month school term that they send their daughter to school. The rations make up approximately 20 percent of an average recipient family's food intake. WFP's current five-year school feeding campaign in Yemen started in 2003. It targeted 1,300 schools in 85 rural districts in areas with high rates of poverty, malnutrition and gender disparity in school enrolment. At the time of the first distribution in May 2003, girls' enrolment in the targeted districts was just under 70,000, official statistics show. A year later, it rose to 109,000; an increase four times more than the project's original goal. This year nearly 120,000 girls have enrolled so far. Omer said that the programme had the funding it currently needed, but was recommending additional funding for expansion, possibly to include boys enrolled in grades six through nine. The food incentives, he added, were "breaking the ice" of conservative cultural attitudes in Yemen that previously put a low priority on girls' education. At the same time, it was making gains on hunger in the most impoverished areas. Still in the woods However, despite activities like school feeding, the Yemeni planning ministry says it is "unlikely" the country can meet the goal of reducing hunger by half by 2015, as set out in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In fact, some indicators show the country has merely stabilised after drastic set-backs suffered in the 1990s. According to the ministry’s statistics, the percentage of underweight children under the age of five was 30 in 1992. This rose to 46 in 1998 – and remained there until 2003. The ministry said the main causes of low nutrition levels were decreasing per capita incomes and remittances from family members working abroad, rising inflation and "unreasonably large portions of family expenditures on qat," a reference to the mildly narcotic plant that is chewed regularly by a majority of the population. UNDP also pointed out dramatic changes in agricultural production trends in recent decades with the country moving from producing nearly all its cereal requirements in the early 1970s, to producing only 26 percent in 1998. Currently, Yemen barely imports enough to meet its total requirements and is therefore food insecure. According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), food security is also not improving in Yemen because of under-funding of agricultural development by both the government and the country's international donors. Yemen’s 2004 poverty reduction strategy report too highlighted a low level of spending on agriculture in relation to other countries in the region. For example, in Egypt, where the agricultural sector contributes 15-16 percent of the country’s GDP, government investment in agricultural development is 10 percent of its total expenditures. Yemen, on the other hand, spent only 2.8 percent of its budget on agriculture in 2003 when the sector was contributing 16-17 percent of the country’s GDP. Other experts argue that Yemen – with its fast growing population and one of the most water-scarce environments in the world – cannot easily achieve food security. "The term 'food security' is problematic because it implies that the country must be producing all the food required by its people," said Naji Abu Hatim, senior development specialist for the World Bank in Yemen. The bank, he added, was developing projects to assist the country switch to cash export crops that use water in a much more efficient way. Agricultural assistance now made up 30 percent of the bank's assistance, he added. Change needed The government’s poverty reduction report called for change in production patterns. Among other things, it suggested that the amount of credit available to farmers through the Cooperative and Agricultural Credit Bank be increased. It also called for more direct assistance to farmers through training and support to community-based development organizations (CBOs). FAO, among others, has since 1999 been helping to create and support CBOs through its Community Based Regional Development Program. Analysts said given that Yemen’s population was 73 percent rural, with 80 percent of that segment living in communities of less than 500 people, CBOs were important catalysts for poverty reduction and development activities. Abu Hatim said the agricultural sector was "very important, not because of its contribution to GDP but because of its social impact". Agriculture employed 65 percent of the labour force, making agricultural assistance "the heart of rural development", he added. According to FAO, however, international assistance was heavily biased towards health, education and government reform projects at the expense of agricultural support, despite the importance of that the sector in coping with the critical issues of hunger and extreme poverty. Investing in agriculture, it argues, would help the country cope with 37 percent unemployment, (according to the World Bank), and inflation. It is also a necessary step in diversifying the country's economy in the face of predicted diminishing oil reserves. In al-Hurita village, high on the wall that Waleeda uses to teach her mother and sister to read and write, she has written a Yemeni saying: "Everything is easy. Only losing someone you love is difficult." According to Muna Muhammed al-Basha, programme officer with WFP, Waleeda has been lucky because Yemeni girls are not commonly permitted to make their own decisions about marriage and education.