How can someone help the school feeding program?
The donor community must advocate and support the government/WFP school feeding initiative in order to provide a food safety net for school-age children and also achieve their educational goals.
Apart from the mechanisms that allow individuals to donate to WFP online, WFP Zambia would like to encourage people to donate directly to the school feeding programme in Zambia. We also hope that school feeding interventions will benefit from resources made available as the international community responds to the global food crisis. Partnership networks to advocate for school feeding need be engaged and developed at local, regional, and national levels.
The annual Walk the World campaign is another venue to support the school feeding program. It has demonstrated that private sector support has a huge untapped potential for mobilization of resources.
Is there anything else you'd like to add about why you think school feeding is important for people to support?
Many Zambian children, especially from rural areas, go without a meal in the morning. They walk great distances to go to school, and when they finally arrive they are hungry and listless. They find it difficult to concentrate. Many other children cannot enroll at all, being forced instead to work, look for food, or help with family chores. School becomes less of a priority. Even when they do enroll, many are frequently absent, reducing their learning capacity and academic performance.
Zambia has one of the highest proportions of children orphaned by HIV/AIDS in the world. The number of such orphans was estimated in 2007 to have reached one million. In the absence of formalized government social protection programs, those food-insecure households hosting orphans and vulnerable children are at extreme risk of losing livelihood assets or utilizing negative coping strategies.
WFP’s school feeding activity in Zambia helps fulfill this vital social-safety-net function and is therefore a viable tool for helping poor children go to school and building a literate society.
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