School meals attract more pupils, improve results

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) on Tuesday launched a drive to get nearly six million more children into school in the Sahel over the next 12 years by extending its school meals programme and combining it with other measures to improve child health. The programme, which is backed by the World Bank but still needs to be funded by donors, was launched at a conference of education ministers from nine countries in the poor and drought-prone region in the Senegalese capital Dakar. In the Sahel as a whole only half the children of school age receive a basic primary education. In some of the poorest countries such as Niger and Mali, only a third of children go to school. And while conservative rural families may be willing to see their sons learn to read and write, many keep their girls at home to help with domestic tasks. The WFP hopes to improve the situation by making free school meals more widely available in the areas of greatest poverty. Girls will be particularly targeted. In many cases, they will not only be given breakfast and lunch, but also some food to take home as well. The idea is that not only will parents find it more attractive to send their children to school. The kids themselves will be brighter, more alert and more receptive to learning if they are well fed. They will therefore achieve better academic results. This was a point made by Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade at the opening ceremony. He called for “a crusade against hunger and malnutrition” in schools and quoted an old French proverb that says “an empty stomach has no ears.” The WFP said its existing school meals programme in West Africa showed that in some cases the introduction of school feeding programmes had doubled enrolment within a year and had produced a 40 percent improvement in academic results within two years. Manuel Aranda da Silva, WFP’s regional director for West Africa, said: “It is simple cheap and it works.” He stressed the need to provide breakfast as well as lunch for children going to school, saying this first meal of the day had a huge impact on their liveliness and ability to concentrate. At present, the WFP supplies the food for school meals for 674,000 children in the Sahel - just 10 percent of the seven million children enrolled in primary schools in the nine targeted countries. This costs an average of US $34 per child per year. However, its alliance for Action on School Feeding, Health and Basic Education for the Sahel, aims to feed and provide clean water and decent sanitation for a total of 5.7 million children by 2015. This is the target date by which all the participating states aim to achieve free primary education for all. That programme will cost about $24 million per year in its early years, rising to $250 million in its final stages, when WFP will be relying on donors for cash to buy 522,000 tonnes of food per year. Wherever possible, this will be purchased from local farmers, so the school meals programme should help stimulate the rural economy of West Africa too. Ahmedou Ould Abdallah, the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative to the region remarked: “WFP is without doubt the best customer of African farmers.” The enhanced school feeding programme will cover Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Gambia, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad. Even in a good year, these poor countries, which consist of dry savannah and desert, only manage to produce 80 to 85 percent of the food they consume, so hunger and malnutrition are a permanent problem in many areas. The WFP has been providing school meals to countries around the world for the past 40 years, but a key aim of its new long-term strategy for the Sahel is to ensure a stronger linkage in government policies between child health and educational achievement. Sheila Sisulu, WFP’s deputy executive director, said: “In the past, many ministers of education saw school feeding as an add-on rather than an integral part of something that would make for better education. Now all the ministers see the linkage.” Accordingly the WFP-led programme includes a package of other measures aimed at boosting child health so that children achieve better results in school. These include a drive by the UN Children’s Fund UNICEF to supply all schools with clean drinking water, proper latrines, iodine and iron supplements and drugs to purge the children of worms and other intestinal parasites. The provision of separate latrines for boys and girls has another aim too – persuading conservative Muslim parents to send their daughters to school since their privacy and modesty will be assured at all times. Aranda da Silva stressed that the WFP’s mandate only allowed it to operate in areas of recognised food insecurity and admitted that this sometimes made it difficult for the organisation to extend its school feeding programmes to the urban poor. Although there, he noted, the WFP operated separate programmes to combat manutrition among children under five. The need for school feeding programmes in large towns as well as remote villages was highlighted by Senegal’s Minister of Education, Moustapha Sourang. His country has already achieved a school enrolment rate of 76 percent and is aiming to put all its children into school “within the next two to three years.” This will largely be done by getting Koranic schools, known as madrassas to incorporate conventional reading, writing and arithmetic and French into their mainly Arabic and religious curriculum. That will require additional investment by the government, which already spends 35 percent of its meagre budget on education. President Wade said he was committed to raising that to 40 percent or more. Wade said education was vital for enabling Senegal’s 10 million people to break out of the poverty trap and free itself from dependency on aid. Education, he stressed, would create a skilled workforce that would be able to undertake more rewarding work than subsistence farming and petty trading. “Having a skilled youth is worth more than all the billions from abroad,” the president said.