Expanding opportunities for the world's children to receive adequate nutrition for learning and achieving their potential.
Our Mission:
“Expand opportunities for the world’s children to receive adequate nutrition for learning and achieving their potential.”
Our Vision:
“A world in which hunger is not a barrier to children learning.”
Earlier last month, GCNF held its 13th annual Global Child Nutrition Forum in Nairobi, Kenya. Along with the Partnership for Child Development (PCD) and the Government of Kenya, the Forum hosted school feeding advocates from 22 African nations and from the countries of Iran, India, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It was truly an inclusive conference in which attendees interacted closely with one another to learn how to create or strengthen school feeding programs in their respective countries.
Perhaps to a degree that no other Forum has previously witnessed, the momentum ignited in Nairobi continues to resonate within the international school feeding community via the School Feeding Call to Action that was distributed at the close of the conference. Echoing the Forum’s theme, “Scaling Up Sustainability: Linking School Feeding with Agriculture Development to Maximize Food Security,” the accord specifically pleaded that all African countries “immediately focus on establishing and expanding home grown school feeding programs through legislation and national policies.” The document, which has since been widely disseminated, goes on to cite the major hurdles of funding the “Feed the Future” initiative and reaching the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by 2015. Both the African Union and NEPAD were invited to support this call to action.
It is so important that the momentum gathered and the best practices and lessons learned at the Forum continue to take shape once the conference has come to an end and participants return home. After all, it is the day-to-day activities with all of their rewards and challenges that bring us back full circle to the next year’s Forum. One such example of this is highlighted in the “Delegate Spotlight” article written by Haile Girmai Aberra of the United Nations World Food Programme in Ethiopia that is featured in this issue of Insider.
Thank you again for everyone who made this year’s Forum a success; we could not have done it without your support and limitless enthusiasm.
Gene White, RD, SNS
