Haile Girmai: Advancing New Ways

Advancing New Ways:
Harnessing linkages between school feeding and
smallholder agriculture for Sustainability

Contributed by Haile Girmai Aberra, National Consultant for Food for Education and Social Protection, UN-World Food Programme, Ethiopia Country Office

In Forums of such importance and diversity of participants, from Governments, academia, International Development agencies,  etc., along with the subject matter tabled for discussion, the most fascinating thing for me as a development professional is to learn that so muc

h is happening and changing so fast yet opening further new potentials for development. At the same time, it entails both opportunities and challenges; an opportunity as it leads to continuous learning, innovation and practice, a challenge as it requires making major leaps to change the lives of the poor and marginalized. The following is my reflection on the Global Child Nutrition Forum, which was held in Kenya, focusing on key issues covered along with recommendations for introducing the HGSF programme in Ethiopia.

Background to the Forum

Investment in education is investment in human capital. Quality education is indeed a social equalizer and one of the most crucial movers for change and for the development of individuals and societies. In order to make education accessible to all, special measures should be taken to reach the poorest, most vulnerable and most disadvantaged segments in a society. One of such special measures is school feeding programme.

Different scholars argue that in order for school feeding programmes to be successful in achieving development intentions, they must not be treated as isolated variables especially in developing countries like Ethiopia. Recent wisdom and cross-country experience tells us that school feeding programmes can be used as springboards for promoting different interventions such as nutrition, food security, and health activities and create a multiplier effect in the overall economy. This has been made possible by creating intersectoral linkages among the different line ministries and encouraging parents and communities to appreciate the programme as an investment shared by the community as a whole and not as a standalone entity.

Nevertheless, the effectiveness and sustainability of school feeding programmes depends upon the efforts made to embed them within the National Development and Poverty Reduction plans and education sector policies by acknowledging the educational and other multiple benefits attributed to them. While by effectiveness, it is meant achieving intended objectives by targeting those most in need and with the most cost-effective means, by sustainability, it is meant transitioning from externally supported projects to nationally owned programmes.

Externally Assisted School Feeding Programmes

Customarily, in developing countries, school feeding programmes are provided in areas where school enrolment, attendance and completion are not taken for granted, mainly for economic reasons. Households found in chronically food insecure areas have to grapple with mere survival which goes to the extent of compromising the education of their children in general and that of girls in particular. Even if they decide to send their children to school, they do so without providing adequate food; this has serious repercussions on attention, cognition and educational achievement as the children are forced to focus on their stomachs rather than concentrating on their education.  It is here that School feeding programmes come into play. School feeding programmes are effective tools to assist poor families, feed hungry children and contribute to their future.

As most developing countries have limited resources and a range of competing priorities in dealing with the different socio-economic problems, school feeding programmes do not often come to the frontline of investment choices and hence resort to external sources of funding. A case in point is the school feeding programme in Ethiopia.

School Feeding Programme in Ethiopia

School feeding is one of the joint development programmes of the UN World Food Programme Ethiopia Country Office and the Ministry of Education (MoE). It is designed to support the Government‘s effort to create access to quality primary education in food insecure areas of the country and ultimately contribute to the achievement of Millennium Development Goal set for education.

The programme provides daily hot meals to all students in target schools and take-home rations, in the form of vegetable oil, only to girls found in Pastoralist areas where there is low level of enrolment for girls so as to encourage their participation and completion.  In addition, the program promotes Children in Local Development (CHILD) methodology, a participatory planning tool to assist communities to improve the school environment and create linkage and partnership between the school and its surrounding community.

The programme, first piloted in 40 schools in 1994, currently covers 1,187 schools assisting 605,538 children found in chronically food insecure rural areas of six out of nine regions in the country. Owing to resource limitations, the coverage of the programme does not match with the huge needs and has exclusive focus in carefully selected rural areas despite clear indications of a need for the programme in additional rural and even urban areas.

Different internal and external studies conducted to evaluate the programme have indicated that it has demonstrated positive effects on enrolment and attendance as well as decreasing drop out rates, particularly for girls. The findings of a Results Based Management (RBM) survey of WFP also showed that girls to boys ratio in WFP assisted schools reached 0.77:1, attendance in WFP assisted schools was 89.97% with girls attendance of 90.28, dropout reduced to 9% which is much less than the national average of about 14%. In a recent external evaluation, phasing out of some programme schools due to resource shortfalls has been observed to have a negative effect on attendance and dropout rates. The program has also contributed much in establishing a community structure and building their capacity to contribute to the programme through the newly introduced CHILD methodology. This, however, has been constrained by resource shortages as it was impossible to rollout the methodology to all the programme schools thereby hindering the progress towards ensuring the sustainability of the programme.

Home Grown School Feeding Programme (HGSFP)

Previously, most school feeding programmes were not integrated into a broader vision as they lacked a conceptual framework with which they can create connections to macro level goals and even add value to them. For this, Home Grown School Feeding Programmes (HGSFP) have been designed to serve as conceptual frameworks and vehicles for agricultural transformation through which connections could be made to the overall economy.

One of the tasks of HGSFP, as a system-wide programme, is to bring together different stakeholders and enable them to work together to support the MDGs in education, nutrition and food security. They are pursued with the intention that food sourced locally can provide a strong incentive to local farmers to produce and sell food to schools. It targets areas with high poverty levels yet with potential to grow food and aims to benefit three groups: school children, small-scale farmers and the entire community.  It is believed that the schools offer farmers structured demand and guaranteed market and price for their produce, giving them an incentive to make improvements to their production levels by adopting modern technologies and inputs. It promotes the provision of wholesome food giving ample possibilities for diversifying nutrition among different interest groups and feeding habits. Moreover, it also enables nearly 100% of the feeding costs to remain in the local economy since transportation, the major expense, will not be an issue.

HGSF is an approach that combines giving vulnerable segments of the population access to food with support to smallholder farmers for food production thereby tackling poverty and hunger. As it promotes local food procurement, it plays a crucial role in ensuring adequate supplies for food assistance programmes, creating market opportunities and favorable commercial relations for farmers.

Taking into account the above issues, we find that HGSF is a relevant approach and tool in supporting the broader macro food security strategy of ensuring self-sufficiency in food production and creating equitable access to food. Cross-country pilot experience has demonstrated the potential of this approach in providing significant benefits to consumers and producers, a situation emphasized by the promotion of diversified and locally relevant products for consumption. In this context, production, purchase and distribution linkages coupled with agricultural support programmes present a huge opportunity to improve farmers’ capability in delivering benefits to consumers as a whole, as well as, to the development of the private sector by boosting the food processing industry, not to mention the jobs created in this regard.

In the specific context of Ethiopia, HGSF resonates well with the main development agenda of the Government of Ethiopia which is poverty eradication and eliminating the country’s dependence on food aid as indicated in the Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP); and contributes to the achievement of the MDGs as well as to the country’s vision of becoming a middle-income country by 2020-2023.

Snapshot of Lessons Learnt and Best Practices from the Forum

In most other countries (Kenya and India to mention some), there is high level of understanding and involvement from other line ministries such as Ministries of Health, Agriculture, and Local Government apart from Ministry of Education. Moreover, in those and other countries, the programme is implemented with legal backing and clear policy and there is a legally mandated Ministry/agency for implementing HGSF.

Kenya is pursuing two HGSFPs in line with the country’s constitution which recognizes the right of the child to basic nutrition and health care, adequate food of acceptable quality and free and compulsory basic education.

In Kenya, the presence of a Parliamentary committee on Education and a Presidential Directive for school feeding has contributed its paramount share in adding strength to the programme. The programme benefits 8.8 million of the hardest to reach children throughout the country. Following the resource shortfall in WFP, which resulted in the reduction of caseload from 1.2 Million to 775,000 children, the Government of Kenya stepped in and introduced two Government funded HGSFPs for 538,000 children at the cost of 779 million Kenyan Shillings per annum allocated by the Ministries of Education and Agriculture. The HGSF in Kenya is implemented with the intention that it will be handed over to the community after three years. Those are best practices showing us how Government commitment, willingness and leadership can make a difference in ensuring sustainability and ownership of the programme, a big development for other countries to emulate.

India also has a mid-day school meal programme (for 120 million children) called “Akshaya Patra” literally meaning “Unlimited food for education” providing food procured locally as part of the Government’s procurement and subsidized public distribution system which, in turn, is part of the country’s broader social welfare system. The Government sets “Minimum Support Price” to smallholder farmers while still giving them options to sell either to the Food Corporation of India or to private buyers. The policy objective is that “no child should be deprived of education because of hunger” which is also part of the country’s constitution and school feeding is considered as the single most powerful tool to take the entire family out of poverty.

Enablers for Introducing HGSF in Ethiopia

In Ethiopia, domestic food production frequently falls behind demand forcing the country to rely increasingly on food imports most of which enters as aid; emergency food aid is estimated at 10% of average grain production (PASDEP, 2005*). The food shortage is expressed by the fact that the country must increase its food production by 500,000mt per year if it is to keep pace with the consumption needs of its fast-growing population. As has been presented in the forum, HGSF can create a significant increase in production of food that can be used for domestic consumption, as well as, for large-scale food assistance programmes beyond the school feeding programme.

For a similar cause, WFP has introduced a Purchase for Progress (P4P) programme in Ethiopia in 2010 with the objective of connecting small-scale / low-income farmers to markets and enabling them to earn more from supplying food to WFP assisted operations. Over the past years, WFP and the Government have built considerable capacity of farmer cooperative unions so that they become primary marketing vehicles for smallholder agricultural sector.

It would also be appropriate to indicate the fact that HGSF has come at such a favourable moment where there is a great deal of knowledge base, interest, commitment as well as relative availability of resources from different stakeholders promoting the issues of education, health, nutrition and food security and opportunities to capitalize on.

In order to support transition from externally driven school feeding to HGSF, Partnership for Child Development (PCD) with the financial support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has launched a new programme to assist government action to deliver sustainable, nationally owned school feeding programmes sourced from local farmers in Sub-Saharan African countries rendering Ethiopia eligible.

As externally supported school feeding programmes run for a fixed number of days within a year and have pre-determined food basket, they don’t provide an opportunity to benefit local farmers and producers nor would they enable children to obtain adequate food during days when they are not in school.

Last but not least, countries that have managed to make transitions to sustainable national programmes have become less dependent on external sources of food by linking school feeding programmes with local agricultural production. Hence, in light of the above discussions, I would like to suggest the following:

Recommendations

1. Broadening the intended goals and objectives of the School Feeding Programme in Ethiopia by making revisions on the existing ones (as such, instead of focusing on educational outcomes only, pursuing multiple benefits of education, nutrition and food security objectives) and backing this up by some form of legal and policy framework.

2. Speeding up the process of formulating the School Health and Nutrition (SHN) Policy and guidelines (of which school feeding will be a part of) and establishing a platform for following up its effective implementation. The policy will contribute a great deal in promoting partnerships, collaboration and commitment among Government Ministries and stakeholders thereby ensuring the design and implementation of sustainable and home grown school feeding programme in the country.

3. Creating space for partnership, alliance and dialogue among stakeholders in the different sectors for pooling resources for sustainable home-grown school feeding programmes in the country. MoE, MoA and MoH should take a lead role, assisted by WFP, in creating and strengthening partnership with GCNF, World Bank and PCD, among others, as they have extensive experience in HGSF by inviting them to Ethiopia and organizing a consultative workshop.

4. Funding agencies should appreciate this approach and take a bold move of gradually providing direct cash support to WFP and other partners for implementing HGSF programmes.

5. Thanks to the Global Child Nutrition Forum, it has become apparent that the Ministry of Agriculture has a key role to play in HGSF. Joint MoE-MoA-WFP pilots should be initiated for new HGSF by bringing CHILD at the confluence of P4P and HGSF.

6. Using the National Social Protection Platform (NSPP) as an entry point for aligning and harmonizing the home grown school feeding programme with other social protection and food security programmes.

7. Conveying clear messages on the importance of school feeding programmes as a social safety nets and a tool for eradicating (short-term?) hunger and achievement of universal primary education by conducting effective lobbying, information dissemination and sensitization missions.

8. Living up to expectations of ratified Regional and International commitments put forth in MDGs, NEPAD, CAADP, and EFA by scaling up and harmonizing efforts for attaining them.

In a nutshell, from the discussions made at the Forum among Government bodies, donors, academia and NGOs, the concept of HGSF is timely and something that shouldn’t be left for any other time. HGSF also needs a focused, integrated approach with a holistic approach rather than a single sector based policy, planning, and enabling strategies for sustainable human development that go beyond mere school feeding programmes. Last, I would like to end my report by indicating my personal ambition that Ethiopia will be having one of the best HGSF in the near future as it is my strong belief that it will receive immediate buy-in from the Government and pertinent stakeholders within the country.