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The United Nations World Food Programme says it is fully behind Government’s school feeding programme that will see school children getting one meal a day beginning this term. Apart from addressing the children’s nutritional concerns, the move is also meant to keep them in school. Addressing journalists in Harare yesterday, WFP country director and representative, Mr Eddie Rowe, said the school feeding programme was part of the agency’s emergency response plan in the face of the El Nino-induced drought facing the nation.
“We recognise in some areas that it is not just the lack of food at home,” he said. “Kids are also impacted by either not going to school or not being consistent in school, and we thought providing one hot meal in school will enable the kids to stay in school and address some of their nutritional concerns.”
He added: “Moving forward, we have established a taskforce through the Ministry (of Primary and Secondary Education) to look at long-term home grown school feeding. In that particular area, our contribution would be to provide technical support to Government in establishing the scheme.
“We hope that in the next 18 months we would have a blueprint for the home grown school feeding programme.” Government has already secured 40 000 tonnes of grain for the schools feeding scheme, that will be carried out in three levels, starting with the infant level that is from early childhood development to Grade Two levels.
The programme will be extended to junior school next year and to secondary schools later. More than 3,2 million children are being targeted and urban areas have been excluded. Government has since instructed all schools in the country to construct storage facilities and prepare feeding points ahead of the roll-out of the programme.
Speaking on the UN drought response in Zimbabwe, UN Resident coordinator Mr Bishow Parajuli said the institution’s $360 million Response Plan was far from being fully funded and development partners should increase their efforts.
“Based on the Humanitarian Needs Overview, the UN in consultation with Government and partners revised the Humanitarian Response Plan to facilitate scaling up the drought response to cover the period April 2016 to March 2017,” he said.
“The focus of this revised humanitarian response plan, which is line with Government priorities and time frame, is on lifesaving and protecting critical livelihoods of 2,8 million people (20 percent of the rural population) with a total requirement of $360 million.
Of this $70 million has been received.”
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