Expanding opportunities for the world's children to receive adequate nutrition for learning and achieving their potential.
Please mark your calendars for the upcoming “A Possible Dream” Gala on Monday, March 5, 2012. Those in attendance will be from international NGOs, the U.S. Congress, USAID, USDA, industry, the School Nutrition Association, and other key agencies working to reduce hunger around the world.
One hungry child in the world is one hungry child too many. In this current economic climate, millions more children are now at risk, in addition to the 350 million already identified by the World Food Programme. GCNF works to end child hunger by establishing and maintaining school feeding programs in developing countries.
You have the power to make it possible for all children, especially girls, to attend school. Join us and make your sponsorship pledge now to help alleviate their hunger; improve their ability to learn; and motivate their parents to send them to school.
If you have any questions regarding sponsorship opportunities, please contact Nicole Bernard at NBernard@schoolnutrition.org or call 301.686.3150. If you cannot attend the Gala, please make a contribution to GCNF by clicking the “Donate” button. We greatly appreciate your support and look forward to working together to advance our vision of living in a world in which hunger is not a barrier to children learning.
*Pictures and article contributed by Desire Yameogo, Country Director, Nutrition Health and Humanitarian Services, Counterpart International
School Feeding to be Given Higher Priority in Cameroon
Cameroon Government to Copy, Implement Plan Elsewhere
In the remote village of Tadu in Northwest Cameroon, the approximately 5,000 inhabitants Mbororo people and others with poverty, malnutrition and low school enrollment rates, especially among girls.
Conditions began to change in 2009 through an innovative program that is part of the U.S. Agriculture Department’s McGovern-Dole Food for Education project, which is implemented by the nonprofit Counterpart International. The three-year project promotes and supports school feeding activities as a means of encouraging school enrollment and attendance in rural communities.
“Our children previously left for school hungry and often crying. But now they are eager for each new school day to begin. Their happiness makes us proud and very happy to cook for them,” said a volunteer cook at Tadu’s government-run primary school.
The main components of the project include school feeding, take-home rations, health and nutrition education, growth monitoring, building school gardens and the refurbishment of onsite facilities, such as school latrines and kitchens, which needed to be updated to carry out program activities effectively.
In only two years, it has had dramatic results:
The success of Counterpart’s program in the Northwest region of the country has been very highly praised.
In June 2011, Tadu welcomed a delegation from the Management Committee comprised of staff from the World Food Program (WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Cameroon’s Ministry of Basic Education. They were welcomed by an enthusiastic crowd of some 1,000 community members and school children upon arrival at Tadu’s government-run primary school.
During their visit, the delegation visited the village’s school garden and the almost 1.5 hectare school farm, where food commodities like maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cabbages and other vegetables are cultivated to supplement U.S.-donated commodities of rice, beans and vegetable oil.
The school gardens and farms also serve as outdoor laboratories for lessons on environmental education and agriculture, which ensure the long-term sustainability of the project. The gardens have generated additional income for the school through the sale of produce. The money generated is used to support other school activities.
The visiting delegation had the chance to see the school’s 24 square meter food storage area, which stores both imported and locally cultivated food commodities. The school’s updated and well-equipped kitchen, which was specially designed to conserve energy by using less wood fuel, is another example of the improvements made under the MGD project.
Besides improving facilities at the school, the project also provided community members with training so that they could effectively manage the new facilities.
“Before we did not know how to prepare food for such a large number of people, but with the training given to us by the project’s health and nutrition staff,” said one participant when asked how the wider community had benefitted from the school feeding program. “We are now invited whenever there is a major occasion in the village and paid to cook for visiting dignitaries.”
The delegation then watched the children eating their school lunch of rice, beans and vegetables. After lunch, there was a working session where parents and teachers exchanged experiences and ideas about the project, the management of the school gardens, the new skills and hygiene and sanitation practices acquired through the project.
“We had heard so much about this program during our various meetings with partners in Yaounde, what we have witnessed here today, is simply marvelous,” said Richard Temfack, Coordinator of the WFP/FAO Management Committee.
The visitors were impressed by the overall level of participation, not just of the school staff and children, but also the participation of parents and the wider community.
“We have learned a lot from you and shall carry your example elsewhere,” said the leader of the delegation, Madam Alice Montheu. She promised that given the enthusiasm shown by the community in supporting their children’s health and education, she will encourage the Ministry of Basic Education to personally visit the project and provide further infrastructural support to the school.
As a result of this visit, the Minister of Basic Education has already indicated that school feeding will be given high priority in Cameroon’s forthcoming National Education Forum.
Circle Monday, March 5, 2012, on your calendar to join GCNF in a celebration of the 2011 champions of child nutrition at the 9th annual A Possible Dream Gala. Make your pledge to ending childhood hunger today and mail in your sponsorship commitment form. Proceeds from this event enable GCNF to provide technical assistance to countries with expanding and developing school feeding programs. Appropriately designed school feeding programs have been shown to increase access to education and learning while improving children’s health and nutrition. Your continued support of GCNF and commitment to ending childhood hunger actually makes a difference in the lives of the world’s children.
As a direct result of GCNF’s technical assistance provided during the annual Global Forum, Mali’s government leaders worked with the Ministry of Education and other agencies in 2009 to draft a national policy that included a five-year plan for 3,000 government-assisted school canteens. In November 2009 the Council of Ministers committed to a five-year plan, strengthening and extending the school feeding program financed by national and territorial governments, technical and financial partners. At the 2010 Forum in Ghana, delegates reported successful collaborations and the impressive fact that 15.4 percent of school children are now receiving meals during the school day.
The Gala is attended by over 500 executives from our most supportive industries, School Nutrition Association officers and directors, and high level government and NGO officials. The highlight of the evening will be the presentation of the prestigious Gene White Lifetime Achievement Award for Child Nutrition to Ambassador Tony P. Hall, Executive Director, Alliance to End Hunger. In addition, GCNF will honor the School Nutrition Association’s (SNA) Industry Member of the Year, Tony Roberts, Proprietor of the Tony Roberts Company and SNA’s Outstanding Director of the Year, Lyman Graham, Director, Roswell Independent School District, Carlsbad Municipal Schools and Dexter Consolidated Schools, New Mexico.
School feeding programs provide nourishment to impoverished children who are then encouraged to attend school, are alert while they are in school, and through their education, go on to become self-sufficient, contributing citizens in their countries. Please join us once again as we honor the champions of child nutrition on Monday, March 5, 2012.
* Please view the Press Release for more information.
Dear Friends,
This Thanksgiving, I would like to take this moment to thank you for all you have done for the Global Child Nutrition Foundation. Your support and generosity is appreciated and much needed in these trying times.
I have always loved Thanksgiving, when family and friends come together around the table to share a meal. This meal symbolizes love, gratitude and warmth for those we care about. It also reminds us of those who go without. For me, I think about the children in places like Ethiopia and Kenya who go to school and sit through class hungry due to a lack of a school meal. GCNF is striving to change this by helping implement school feeding programs and policies in the developing world.
During this time of thanks, I would like for you also to consider it a time of giving. Please make a contribution to GCNF today to help us continue to expand school feeding programs to the neediest countries around the world.
Sincerely,
Gene White, MS, RD, SNS
President
*Pictures and article contributed by Carol N. Kiugo, Student Nutrition Coordinator, Insta Products
One Hungry Child is One too Many
The Anne K. Taylor (AKT) Fund is a private NGO focused on community based conservation projects, founded by Anne Kent Taylor. It is an innovative approach to wildlife conservation based on the idea that indigenous people make the best conservationists. This project has been so successful that many species of wildlife have returned to areas of Maasi Mara, Kenya where they had once disappeared due to hunting and illegal poaching.
The AKT Fund was not only created to encourage and assist individuals, communities and corporations to conserve, protect and restore bio-diversity through sound economic activities that are ecologically sustainable, but has also put smiles on the faces of many students in Masai Mara. Together with Insta Products, they provide a nutritious meal of fortified blended porridge every school day to give students a chance of a healthier, brighter future.
Insta Products is a local private company that has developed a growing family of high quality, pre-cooked blended foods made from soya, whole grains, and other natural ingredients. Insta has invested significant resources into maintaining a high food quality system (HACCP: Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Program) to assure that all products manufactured at its facility are safe to consume and are of the highest quality.
Objectives of the program are:
1) Increase school attendance overall
2) Increase female attendance
3) Improve nutritional status in students
4) Improve student performance academically and physically
5) Increase teacher job satisfaction and motivation
6) Improve girl-child education
7) Reduce community harvesting of wild game for meat; increase wildlife
The School Feeding Program (SFP) supplies one hot nutritious meal of whole soy/maize/sorghum/ millet cooked porridge a day. The programme benefits more than 450 school children in Maasai land. Masai Mara is a semi-arid part of Kenya, and the meal from the schools is the only food they might get all day. The porridge is prepared in school by parent volunteers and offered to the students daily as 400ml mug of “uji”.
Children in Maasai-land would normally stay away from school to look after animals, pick wild berries, or perform other types of work that would bring in food for the family. The SFP has taken the burden off of children and their families, and allows the children to go to school. I overheard a seven year old student from Olomong’i Primary School saying, “I won’t make it to school tomorrow because I am accompanying my mother to look for food, but if the feeding program had started I would have stayed in class and do my studies”.
“If the children don’t go to school, that area will remain poor and vulnerable”, Faith the head teacher at Olomong’i said.
Children who are stunted, anemic, experience hunger or have poor dietary intakes tend to have poorer school performance including late enrollment, and poor attendance, behavior, cognition and achievement levels. Thus they are more likely to drop out of school early and repeat grades. Providing appropriate nutritional and health intervention at school age will improve the children’s performance.
Improved health and nutrition status among children contributes to high enrollments, better school attendance, lower dropout rates, improved performance in academic work and to social equity and economic growth, as healthy persons have the energy to work.
SFPs are offered at Pusangi and Ololomong’i schools, along with a number of other interventions like nutrition and health education which promote the health and nutritional status of the school children.
The SFP is also working towards achieving several Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It also provides a platform for directly addressing child health and nutrition, for example, through deworming schemes and PHASE. Among the poor and disadvantaged there is often not enough food at home. School meals are a good way to channel vital nourishment to poor children, having a full stomach also helps students concentrate on their lessons. School is where they get their best meal of the day; by the time they get home their dinner will be little more than a few mouthfuls.
In Maasailand where school attendance is low, provision of at least one nutritious meal each day boosts enrollment and promotes regular attendance. The nutritious meal of porridge comes from Insta Products that uses fortified food to ensure that children get the micronutrients they need. Diet and nutrition play a critical role in physical and intellectual development.
Most young girls’ education continues to be a major problem; they are kept at home to work the fields and look for food or tend livestock.
The SFP aim is to improve school attendance among vulnerable, food insecure people. Food attracts children to school and gives them the energy and concentration to focus on learning.
At least one nutritious meal a day is offered which contains necessary micronutrients i.e. vitamins and minerals allows them to learn and develop their potential. The food will not only feed the body but also feeds the mind to change their lives.
Insta Products and the Anne K. Taylor Fund has brought one of life’s essentials to the world’s most deprived students! It’s happy days for the students at Pusangi and Olomong’i Primary Schools, despite the ordeals they have suffered in their short lives. They are fed both kinds of hunger- the hunger for food and for education-because they are intimately related.
A number of guidelines exist around nutritional requirements and recommended daily allowances. The following guidelines are from Insta Products on the appropriate intake of dry serving of flour per day.
| Foundation Plus product | Kcal | Intake of dry four |
| Energy (Kcal) | 500 students | 100 gms per day (Per student) |
While school feeding programs are notable on their own, it is recommended that they be implemented alongside other interventions to maximize impact. The most common interventions included in the program are;
Related, is information on nutrition, health and sanitation knowledge amongst teachers, parents and students. If the teachers and parents do not have adequate knowledge or have inaccurate knowledge related to nutrition, the impact of the program will be greatly decreased. For the SFP to be successful various educational components and sensitization in the programs have been included, not only to students, but also to parents and teachers. Children play an important role in passing educational information on to parents and other family members. Parents are important to the long-term adoption of various health practices. They need to understand the benefits of and reasons for various health practices, as well as the reasons for designing and implementing the SFP in certain ways. As previously mentioned involving parents and teachers in project design can act as a valuable education tool and greatly impacts the success of the project.
Most health problems are directly or indirectly associated with the quality of water and environmental sanitation. The top four illnesses indicated by the Masaai land community are malaria, diarrhea, intestinal worms and vomiting. Personal Hygiene and Sanitation Education (PHASE) is also offered in the program to the teachers, students and parents.
Provision of leaky tins is one of the methodologies of health education being used to avoid diseases.
Helminthes Control (Deworming)
Helminthes control is the provision of deworming drugs to children in the schools. The infection is rarely acute and tends to be chronic, negatively affecting all aspects of development including nutrition, cognitive development and access to education.
Helminthes affect health through abdominal obstruction, muscular pain, diarrhea, vomiting, and fatigue, to name a few. Malnutrition is aggravated through diarrhea, which in turn lowers resistance to infections. The increased malnutrition impairs cognitive function and psychomotor development, as well as brain development. Stunting is a common symptom, which in turn delays children’s enrollment in primary school, which is one of the objectives that we want to eradicate.
Without adequate nutrition, health and hygiene education, school feeding programs seem to be less effective.
