@FAO Ethiopia

FAO seizes opportunity to improve nutrition in schools  

11 July 2016, Addis Ababa – Despite this high-level commitment and the strong potential to contribute to several Sustainable Development Goals, current school feeding is often donor-driven and hardly linked to local production. It is in that respect that FAO, as a technical agency, has developed a School Food and Nutrition Framework that takes an integrated and food systems-based approach to school feeding, with four key components including Home Grown School Feeding, Healthy School Food and Meals Guidelines, Food and Nutrition Education, and Policy and Regulations.

According to  Patrick Kormawa, FAO Sub-regional Coordinator for Eastern Africa and Representative to AU & ECA, “The study, which is the first of its kind, will help develop, implement and institutionalize a sustainable school food and nutrition program in Eastern Africa that will simultaneously improve educational outcomes of children, improve nutrition status of children and their families, enhance life skills of school children through farming and cooking skills, reduce rural poverty through income generation for local farmers, integrate in the program and empower community and families, and provide a platform for other school setting related to health”.  

To implement such an approach, FAO took inspiration from what is already been done in school feeding programs in participating countries (Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda). The assessment to be undertaken through the new project aims to learn good practices and success factors from existing initiatives, to understand how rural economies and communities are contributing to such programmes, and find commonalities that could be implemented as standards to sustain this initiative.

Kormawa was addressing a regional workshop on the “Assessment of Good Practices for Mainstreaming School Feeding and Nutrition Education in Secondary Schools in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda" in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 

Speaking on behalf of the Director, Rural Economy and Agriculture of the Africa Union Commission (DREA), Mr Laila Lolosang, CAADP Pillar III advisor, noted that this initiative will directly contribute to the implementation of the Africa Regional Nutrition Strategy (ARNS) 2016 – 2025. As part of this strategy, Africa Union Members States have adopted March 1 as the Africa Day for School Feeding. The first edition of this celebration was commemorated this year in Niger, and also in Rome by the Rome-based UN agencies, receiving high-level recognition from FAO leadership. “The activity we are launching today is the result of that high level commitment,” said Mr. Lolosang. 

According to the Cost of Hunger in Africa study, students who are undernourished early in life are more likely to repeat grades and/or to drop out of school. On the other hand, school feeding can play an important role in promoting health; linking agriculture and nutrition education to school feeding provides a great opportunity to ensure that school children develop into healthy and well-educated productive citizens who can contribute to their country’s economic growth and transformation. 

Participants from governments and FAO agreed that an integrated approach to school food and nutrition requires connecting key components which cut across policy commitment, standardizing approaches, and active participation of the communities around the school, teacher and students. Discussion points included the current challenges in linking school feeding and nutrition education, development of the assessment methodology, and project implementation plans and time-lines.

Integrating agriculture and nutrition education in secondary school and linking it to school feeding provides a great opportunity to ensure that school children develop into healthy and well educated productive citizens who can influence food and nutrition security outcomes of a nation and secure their future livelihoods. 

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