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International: World Food Programme
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In many parts of
sub-Saharan Africa, 60 percent of children come to
school in the morning without breakfast, if they attend
school at all. Many suffer from health and developmental
problems, including stunted growth. Exhausted from
hunger and poor nutrition, they often have trouble
paying attention and learning during class.
The United Nations
World Food Programme (WFP) provides school meals for
about 20 million children in Africa. While some national
governments, including Côte d’Ivoire, have provided
school meals for decades, the food, fuel, and financial
crises of 2007–08 highlighted the role that school
nutrition programs can play in not only improving
education, health, and nutrition, but also providing a
safety net for children living in poverty. For some
children, these programs provide the only real meal of
the day.
Improved school menus provide students with much-needed
nutrition while also creating an incentive for both
students and parents to keep up regular attendance. Some
programs include a take-home ration, targeted
specifically at improving the attendance of girls. In
exchange for an 80-percent attendance rate for one
month, for example, students are able to take home a jug
of vegetable oil to their family. Students also often
share the nutrition information they learn at school
with family members, helping to improve the nutritional
value of meals made at home.
Earlier this year, the
Partnership for Child Development (PCD), in
partnership with the WFP and with funding from the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, launched the Home
Grown School Feeding (HGSF) program. HGSF, modeled in
part after programs developed by the New Partnership for
Africa’s Development (NEPAD), works with governments to
develop and implement school feeding programs, improving
the diets and education of students while also creating
jobs and supporting local agriculture.
Starting with five countries that were either already
running school food programs or had demonstrated an
interest in them and a capacity for
implementation—including Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Mali,
Kenya, and Ghana—HGSF hopes to create a bigger market
for rural farmers through demand created by purchasing
only locally grown and processed food for school meals.
“The definition of ‘local’ varies from country to
country,” says Kristie Neeser, program coordinator at
PCD. “Some schools keep their food purchasing within the
local community and some keep their purchasing within
the country. But what is most important is creating that
relationship between the farmers and the government
program.”
To best facilitate links between farmers and
governments, HGSF works closely with the ministries of
education to develop programs that will suit local needs
and customs. In Ghana, for example, markets are run by
“market queens,” women who purchase vegetables from
farmers and then sell them to commercial buyers at
markets. To avoid disrupting this system, HGSF works to
incorporate the market queens with Ghana’s school
purchasing process, instead of attempting to deal
directly with the farmers, as programs in other
countries often do.
Ultimately, HGSF hopes to work with 10 countries,
transitioning each program to being fully government
owned, funded, and implemented—creating a permanent
safety net for school children and a dependable demand
for local, small-scale, farmer-sourced produce.
Nourishing the Planet:
Evaluating Environmentally Sustainable Solutions
to Reduce Global Hunger and Rural Poverty
A Worldwatch Institute project supported by the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Agricultural development has come to a crossroads.
Nearly a half-century after the Green Revolution—the
first systematic, large-scale attempt to reduce
poverty and hunger throughout the world—a large
share of the human family is still chronically
hungry. At the same time, investments in
agricultural development by governments,
international lenders, and foundations are at
historic lows.
The timing couldn’t be worse, as a complexity of
demographic, economic, and natural forces all
conspire to make the challenge of reducing hunger
that much more difficult. These include soaring
petroleum and food prices as well as climate change
and persistent unfair trade agreements. Still, the
current crisis offers a window of opportunity for
refocusing the world’s attention on food,
agriculture, and rural areas and for reestablishing
food security as a global priority. As more decision
makers and funders shift resources back toward
agricultural development in coming years, they have
a gaping need
for guidance.
In recent decades, a new generation of innovative
approaches to hunger alleviation has emerged from
farmers groups, private voluntary organizations,
universities, and agribusiness companies. Many of
these approaches offer useful models for
larger-scale efforts. There is growing evidence that
combinations of approaches (such as conventional
practices paired with agroecological approaches or
input-driven methods that also protect natural
resources) are often more effective in terms of
productivity, income generation, and resilience.
The Nourishing the Planet project will assess the
state of agricultural innovations—from cropping
methods to irrigation technology to agricultural
policy—with an emphasis on sustainability,
diversity, and ecosystem health, as well as
productivity. The project aims to both inform global
efforts to eradicate hunger and raise the profile of
these efforts. The project will also consider the
institutional infrastructure needed by each of the
approaches analyzed, suggesting what sort of
companion investments are likely to determine
success—from local seed banks to processing
facilities, from pro-poor value chains to marketing
bureaus.
The project will culminate in the release of State
of the World 2011, a comprehensive report that will
focus on agriculture and will be accompanied by
derivative briefing documents, summaries, videos.
and podcasts. This volume will be a roadmap for
foundations and international donors interested in
supporting the most effective agricultural
development interventions in various agroecological
and socioeconomic contexts. The project’s findings
will be disseminated to a wide range of influential
agricultural stakeholders, including government
ministries, agricultural policymakers, farmer and
community networks, and the increasingly influential
non-governmental environmental and development
communities.
Emphasizing on the ground research, project
co-director Danielle Nierenberg is currently
traveling throughout sub-Saharan Africa to meet with
farmers, farmers groups, local government
representatives, funders, and NGO’s. You can follow
her research and the resulting conversations on the
Nourishing the Planet blog:
http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet
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