Rwanda is on the long road to recovery from the 1994 genocide that devastated the African nation. Hunger and poverty still grip the country. The way out of this vicious cycle is food and education. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is helping provide school meals to fight child hunger and promote class attendance. Lets take a closer look at this program with Guy Adoua, a World Food Programme officer in Rwanda.
How many children benefit from the WFP school feeding programs in Rwanda?
WFP Rwanda is providing food assistance to 300,000 primary schoolchildren, in 300 schools located in the most food-insecure zones of Rwanda.
Discuss what effect the meals have on the children in terms of school attendance, performance, and nutrition.
Chronic food insecurity and structural poverty seriously reduce opportunities for children in many parts of Rwanda to complete primary education. Lack of food prevents many children from enrolling in school, forces them to be frequently absent, and weakens the learning ability of those who do attend classes, thus affecting their academic performance and compromising their future. In short, lack of food helps perpetuate the cycle of poverty.
To help alleviate this problem, WFP launched a school feeding project in 2002, with an overall objective of supporting the Government’s goal of ensuring universal primary education by 2010. The government’s target date is five years earlier than the one stipulated at the 1990 World Conference on Education, to which Rwanda is a signatory.
The project targets 12 food-insecure, drought-prone districts in the eastern and southern provinces of Rwanda, which show low overall rates of primary enrollment or low attendance of girls.
Girls and boys attending the primary schools relieve their short-term hunger and boost their learning capacity by eating a daily meal of maize meal and beans. The meal, mixed with oil and salt, provides them with 532 kilocalories (i.e. calories), including 22 grams of protein and 16 grams of fat necessary for their growth. After five years of implementation, attendance rates in WFP-assisted schools increased from 73 percent to 95 percent, while the drop-out rate among girls decreased from 22.7 percent to 5 percent.
What plans are there for making school meals available for all children?
Article comments