Given their situation of vulnerability, the school meal becomes a stimulus for children to attend school, helping reduce desertion rates. It is also a strategy for combating child labor, because we have identified that many parents sent their children to work in order to increase family income, earning the money necessary for their nutrition.
Our feeding program also integrates community development strategies, involving mothers in the operation of the school restaurants. In order to accomplish this, they receive training and support in the process of forming a cooperative.
This is a general description of our program:
Nutrition: Seeking to strengthen and improve the nutritional status of children of school age, providing daily nourishing food through school restaurants, implementing a nutritional assessment system and promoting a participatory culture of nutrition, creating healthy lifestyles to improve food security in the communities.
Actions:
a. Daily Food: providing breakfast and lunch to all children during the school year, seeking to fulfill 75% of daily food requirements.
b. Monitoring and nutritional assessment: Twice a year, nutrition professionals carry out a size and weight measurement with all children, in order to establish the progress made in nutritional status. This action encourage the participation of older students and it requires a specific software.
c. De-worming and vaccination: Once a year, children receive the necessary doses of vaccines and anti parasites. Additional home monitoring is implemented to verify the outcomes.
d. Training workshops on hygiene and eating habits: Every six months we provide a training workshop on hygiene and eating habits to parents and 96 teachers of the educational institutions we serve, with the goal of improving knowledge and awareness of proper food handling, its nutritional value, and its preparation, in order eradicate infectious and viral diseases. This training is carried out by health and nutrition professionals.
e. Workshops on health promotion and access to public health system: Seminaries about accessing public health services and exercising fundamental rights, performed by law professionals.
f. Improvement of school restaurants: Ensuring adequate equipment for the provision of a high quality service.
g. Training in food preparation and cooperative making for community mothers in charge of the operation of the school restaurants.
Tell us something about the children who are participating in the school feeding program. What are some of their favorite subjects?
Beneficiaries of our programs are vulnerable and/or displaced children and youngsters of school age in the three regions mentioned above.
Children manifest a preference for creative subjects, such as arts and music. This is a very important emphasis of the schools we sponsor.
What is the status of funding for the Barefoot Foundation's school feeding programs in Colombia? Are there plans to expand the school feeding to reach more children?
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