UN: School Meal Programs More than Just a Plate of Food
Nearly 420 million
children benefited from free school meals last year, a new World Food Program
report said Tuesday, providing an important safety net as hunger reaches
unprecedented crisis levels worldwide.
"Governments worldwide
seem to be increasingly recognizing that the health and nutrition of children
is something that needs to and must be protected, even in the context of fiscal
crises that are affecting the world, and particularly low-income countries,”
Carmen Burbano, WFP’s head of school-based programs, told reporters in a video
briefing from Rome.
The State of School
Feeding report is the first since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted
the education of 1.5 billion students and young people around the world, and
took away the only guaranteed daily meal for millions of them.
The report says the
number of children reached by school meal programs now exceeds pre-pandemic
levels. In 2022, WFP says 418 million children worldwide received school meals
— 30 million more than just before the pandemic hit in early 2020.
Burbano said much of
this is due to governments ramping up domestic funding by around $5 billion
over the last two years to nearly $48 billion overall for these programs. She
said this is happening in both rich and poor countries.
"One of the big
findings of the report is that the rally of governments, this domestic
mobilization, is unprecedented,” she said.
She attributed much of
that success to the School Meals Coalition, which was launched in 2021 and
seeks to provide a nutritious, free school meal to every child by 2030. More
than 75 heads of state have joined the coalition.
"And it’s their
commitment, it’s their mobilization, that’s achieved this unprecedented
result,” Burbano said.
Safety net
WFP says school meal
programs are a critical safety net for vulnerable children and households,
especially at a time when 345 million people face crisis levels of hunger
worldwide, including 153 million children.
The combination of the
COVID-19 pandemic, conflicts, economic and climate crises, and now Russia’s war
in Ukraine, have seen food prices rise over the past three years, making it
harder for many families to regularly put nutritious meals on the table. While
the Food and Agriculture Organization says prices for key food items are
beginning to come back down, healthy meals are still not affordable for
everybody.
Millions still hungry
But despite successes,
disparities persist, and millions of children who need the meals are not
getting them.
"We are estimating at
the moment about 73 million children living in low-income countries in extreme
poverty, with high levels of malnutrition, don’t have access to these
programs,” Burbano said, urging the international community to help bridge that
gap.
She said feeding
program coverage in low-income countries is only at about 18%, compared with
around 60% in high-income countries.
"If you are a child
that is born in a country like Niger, like Somalia or Haiti, you have the
double whammy of going to school in sub-funded education systems, but also
understanding that you are probably going there on an empty stomach. You are
probably sick. You are probably hungry. And then we wonder why children are not
learning in these countries,” Burbano said.
She added that research
shows that in low-income countries, 70% of children under age 10 cannot read or
write a simple sentence.
"Part of this is
because they don’t have enough to eat, and they are sitting in these classrooms
hungry and without the proper support,” she said.
For many low-income
families, a free school meal is an added incentive to keep their children in
school. This is especially important for girls, who are usually the first ones
pulled from the classroom when parents cannot afford to educate all of their
children.
For girls, this can
have lifelong consequences, including exposure to early marriage and
motherhood, and a loss of earning potential. The U.N. Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization says just one more year of school can increase a
girl’s earnings as an adult by as much as 20%.
School feeding programs
don’t just benefit the students. WFP says these programs have created 4 million
jobs in 85 countries, many of them supporting women who prepare the food, as
well as small holder farmers who produce it.
VOA
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