WFP food for education programme helping more children

In a effort to get children to school and mitigate the impact of short-term hunger on learning, the World Food Programme (WFP) is stepping up its current food for education programme in Afghanistan. Launched in March, the programme coincides with the country's back-to-school campaign initiated earlier this year. "Over 200,000 students are being supported by this programme," the WFP food for education coordinator for Afghanistan, Bai Bojang told IRIN in the Afghan capital, Kabul. "Projections are that by March 2003, we are likely to reach one million." Many of the students participating in the programme were from families recently returned from Pakistan and Iran, whose ability to earn a living were weak, he explained. As part of the programme, students in the schools receive 200 grammes of fortified wheat bread, enabling them to access micronutrients they might not normally receive in their diet and thereby increasing their concentration in the classroom. In what is known as the Badakhshan approach to the programme - or otherwise take-home campaign - students receive an allotment of 12.5 kg of wheat per month. Additionally, as an incentive to boost female enrolment, girls also receive four litres of oil. While the programme has proven a tremendous help in stepping up the impact of the school and education system on the child and community, the effort has also helped to bridge the gap between the two. "Parents are taking a greater interest in the schools and the learning process itself," Bojang said. "Many communities have become more active in the construction of facilities and classrooms. Two years ago, this wasn't the case at all," he added. Standing outside the Mir Mom Khaju school in Kabul's district one, Glenda Johnson Ellam, a WFP programme officer, told IRIN that in this school alone, 560 rations of bread were being distributed each day. While meeting current needs, she said that infrastructure problems limited bread distribution, particularly with regard to water. "There is a big problem of dust and polluted water. We are concerned they might be using dirty water, so we are being very careful," she said, adding that they were currently waiting to change to biscuits, which could be available as early as November, citing a 10,000 mt pledge from India. "People are preparing for the biscuits. We can, in fact, deliver them better, and also work on improving the school's infrastructure with regard to sanitation and water," she said. "If we could go to biscuits and do school reconstruction, by the time we go to bread, all the elements which are important to hygiene will be in place." But ensuring that students had some bread or something to eat that would keep them attentive in the classroom remained her main concern. "If the break comes and there is nothing to eat, they will go home," she said. Although dependent on what kind of families the children come from, most of the newer students - whose parents were struggling to pay rent and other rising costs each month - were coming directly from home with only a cup of tea in their stomach, she added. Meanwhile, in Mazar-e Sharif in northern Afghanistan, according to Erika Maclean, a programme officer there, the effort is two-fold. "We do the school feeding programme, but also an income-generating programme for mothers," she told IRIN. Setting up parent-teacher committees for every school, the most vulnerable mothers are targeted, and WFP assists in the construction of ovens at their homes, she said. "Instead of reconstructing big bakeries, we have decided to go to small co-ops, because we feel it is more sustainable for our exit point," she said. "Then the mothers and the schools can own the project." At the moment, over 138,000 children in 165 schools are participating in the programme, employing 825 women. Working with the Ministry of Women's Affairs and setting up parent-teacher committees, she described it as "very gender focused". "We work solely with the women and children," she said. But Bojang added that whether you started through a women's initiative like Mazar-e Sharif or through the schools system, as long as the guidelines were clear that a sizable amount of the numbers were women, the approach was similar - although the points of intervention might be different. As for current constraints on the programme, the coordinator warned, however, that "the basket" was limited. "We have limited capacity. Enrolment has increased so much recently that schools have been forced to adopt a shift system. This limits the time for both lessons and food distribution," he explained.