Blog
Earlier this afternoon here at Friends of the World Food
Program (Friends of WFP), I was able to participate in a United Nations World
Food Program (WFP) Behind the Scenes: Live from Kenya conference call. While we
have all read about hunger in the news and have formed vague ideas about global
hunger issues, two Friends of WFP colleagues and six WFP Committee volunteers have
encountered, firsthand, the serious problems that face over 1 billion people in
the world today.
The call began with staggering statistics: WFP is currently
trying to reach around 4 million people affected by the drought in Kenya; over
42 percent of Kenya’s population lives on less than $1 per day; the Somali
refugee population increases by approximately 6,000 people per month; in one
HIV/AIDS clinic the group visited, there are 7,000 patients, with an
approximated 5 percent increase per year. The numbers are enormous. Yet what
does this all actually look like?
Our friends in the field were able to help paint the
sobering picture in our minds. They visited WFP School Meals programs and saw
how necessary the meals provided by the schools are to the children who receive
them. For many of these children, a school meal is the only meal they receive
each day. While this is a very sad realization, that one meal has helped
improve the children’s qualities of life. It also goes a long way in promoting
education. When meals are guaranteed, parents have more of an incentive to send
their children to school instead of keeping them at home to work. This is
especially true for girls. As we heard from our representatives in the field,
this realization is bittersweet. 
While the call set a serious tone, it was not without its
breakthrough moments. Children at one of the schools the group visited had set
up their own inventive system to wash their hands before meals because the
school could not afford running water. In another area, a water pan project was
created as part of a community initiative. Women from nearby villages dug the
pan to capture rain water. In exchange for their labor, WFP provides these
women with food. This is known as WFP’s Food for Work/Food for Training Program.The
water can now be used for basic daily needs in a time where drought is a main
concern. Our representatives were enthusiastic about the promise that these
projects show for the future.
On the other side of the call, sitting around the conference
room table, each employee of Friends of WFP had a serious look on their face.
The wheels were churning about what the next step might be for us and how we
could do more than what we’re doing right now. It is the real experiences of
our colleagues and volunteers that help fuel the efforts of these programs. It
is the stories they will bring home to share that will empower more people to
take the initiative for change and to become passionate about the issues raised
by global hunger. For me, the next step was writing this post to organize my
thoughts and to encourage people to join in the movement.
To learn even more about the trip to Kenya,
please read the blog posts that precede mine. They are full of amazing stories
that help bring the idea of world hunger closer to home with firsthand accounts
and conversations with WFP recipients. They are truly humbling. - Sara Thomson
Outreach Intern
Friends of WFP
 On Wednesday, we arrived at our first school meals program in an urban environment. One of the goals of this trip was to observe several different school meals programs and determine the main differences between the rural and urban feeding programs. Pulling into the school, I noticed several children waiting to greet us. The smile on a child’s face as they see a WFP truck pull up is indescribable.
Mukindani Primary School currently has 1,553 students, of which 100 of them are in preschool. These children come from a radius that encompasses five surrounding slums. Most students have to walk as many as 5 kilometers each way every day to reach the school. The school consists of only 20 classrooms for all of the students. One of the main reasons that children attend school is because they can be assured that they will receive a hot meal; often their only meal of the day. The World Food Program works with an organization called Feed the Children. The job of this organization is to visit with schools that house the most vulnerable children, monitor the attendance of these schools and work so that children are being fed and attending school regularly. Many of the children were talking and laughing as we got out of the vehicles. We were greeted by the head teacher and invited into the main office. The office was dark and crowded. We began discussing the problems that are faced at Mukindani. The school is currently on a short-term school meals program that is used only in emergency situations. The program was implemented at this school because the droughts made it impossible for the children to receive food elsewhere. Kenya has experienced a drought that has compromised the last four harvest cycles. With the recent rains, the country may now begin to develop new harvests for food in the near future. It is for this reason that the program will cut funding and assistance to this school within the month of November.  As we finished the meeting, we were asked to join the students for a special presentation in the courtyard. The mass of students began swaying and singing a wonderful song of welcome. When they finished, Friends of WFP was able to engage the children in discussion and activity. I began taking pictures of the children around me. I noticed that the children were absolutely fascinated with the sight of their own picture. Many of these children had never seen themselves before.
I began speaking with a young girl about her life in the Mombasa slums. Her name was Caroline and she was nine years old. She has one younger brother but he is too young to attend school with her. Caroline arrives at school at 6:30am and does not return home until 6:45pm. During the day she learns many different subjects including English, math, science and art. She informed me that the school meals program has helped her immensely. She is now able to concentrate and study hard so that she may one day rise above poverty and achieve success. Touring the kitchen was one of the harder things to do. It was almost barren with a large silver caldron for mixing the supplemental food. I asked how many bags of food it took to feed all of the children at the school for one day and I was told that it takes four bags to properly serve the children. Unfortunately, with the closing of the program in the near future, the administration has had to cut down on the amount of food that can be served. The new ration is now three bags for all 1500+ students. This decision was made to try and stretch the food out as long as possible. Right before we left the slums, the children came into the courtyard to wish us well. There was such a difference in the urban schools verses the rural school programs. In the rural areas, the children are well behaved and disciplined rather than those in the urban environment. The attendance rate in rural schools is very high and the children are healthy and happy. In the 1980’s, the rural schools had implemented the program because the families could not easily find employment. However, the children in the slums have only had the program temporarily and parents of the students are expected to find employment that will allow them to support their family. Also, children in the urban environments tend to me more rowdy and less disciplined. After speaking with the head teacher, I was informed that since the program began at Mukindani, the attendance rates have increased and the children have become more focused in class. School meals programs are highly effective ways to increase a child’s attendance, help them focus and ensure that they are being properly fed and cared for. The children at this primary school made me realize the impact that the school meals program can have on a child’s life. Jennifer Armit
Day 3: Visit to the Kibera Slums, Nairobi
Today we visited a school located in the slums of Nairobi. Kibera, as the slums are called, is a community with its own police station and more than 200 schools. Over 1 million people live within a 1.5 square mile radius. A large percentage of its inhabitants are children (probably more than half, as many are orphans).
Walking through Kibera is fascinating. Lively music blares from speakers hidden in little huts. Stalls offer all sorts of items for sale. Clothes and plastic sandals, fruits and vegetables and tasty little snacks (fried potatoes and sugarcane) can be purchased within the walls of these slums. Chickens, cats and dogs roam freely. It is chaotic, but Kibera is vibrant and in a strange way is welcoming to its visitors.
It had rained heavily the night before our visit. The path was muddy and slippery. It was quite a challenge to walk around. Flying toilet bags (the name says it all) were scattered everywhere. Corrugated tin roofs were our only support. Luckily, none of us slipped or fell in that muddy mess. Four armed guards escorted us wherever we ventured.
After a visit to an HIV/AIDS Center, we made our way to Stara Resource Center and School. Stara has over 530 students, and 53 percent of them are females. 70 percent of the children are orphans, 15 percent have only one parent and the remainder are neglected. Nearly 330 of the children have been screened, and 10 percent of them have tested positive for HIV/AIDS. The school has 13 teachers and two social workers.
The Center started in 1998 as a woman's cooperative and started with six children looking for food. In 2004, the World Food Program implemented its school meals program and enrollment rocketed from 200 to its current number. By providing a meal for children (consisting of maize and pulses cooked in palm oil), attendance and school performance increased significantly. Many of these children have no other source of food and the school meal is the only thing they will eat all day. As you can imagine, food is a strong incentive for the children to attend school.
The Center tries to involve parents, particularly the mothers. They are encouraged to make crafts (such as beaded necklaces) and sell them to visitors. All proceeds are invested back into the school.
Staff from the World Food Program (which provides the food) and Feed the Children (which implements the school meals program) monitors the distribution of food and conducts monthly inspections to ensure that standards are being met.
The benefits of the school meals program are evident. Children attend the school so they can eat. With a full belly, they can concentrate better on their schoolwork. By staying in school, the children stay off the streets and out of trouble.
It’s hard for us back home to fully understand how important the school meals program is to the school and to these children. Visiting Stara School has allowed me to witness it firsthand. I only wish more people could see it as well. Only then would they realize how truly blessed we are because we don't have to worry about our next meal.
After this trip, I won't complain about my weight again! I consider myself lucky to have that extra meat on my bones.
-Alexa
Today we went to visit WFP programs located in the Kibera slums in Nairobi, Kenya. Kibera is the largest slum in Africa with over 1 million people living in only 1.5 square miles. The Kibera slums began after World War II when the South Sudanese who were fighting for the British settled there. The settlement gradually turned into a slum as it grew and became populated by many who were displaced after land disputes. There is also a high percentage of women settled in Kibera due to the lack of protection laws for women. For example, when a husband dies, a woman loses their land and if she is not taken in by her husband’s family, she is left with nothing. Kibera has become a very dangerous place in recent years especially after the 2008 election when there was a huge increase in riots between tribes in Kibera. Even just a few days ago, there was a violent clash between two tribes. People were killed and homes were burned to the ground. Given the security issues, our group was escorted to the slum by four armed guards and undercover UN security. Our visit included the Lea Toto HIV Care Center, a WFP beneficiary’s home and a WFP school meals program. The Lea Toto HIV Center serves orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs) who are HIV positive. Lea Toto was established in 1998 initially as a mobile outreach initiative whose goal was to reach out to HIV-positive children. In 1999, Lea Toto became a full fledged community home-based care program which includes HIV care for OVCs and food and nutritional support provided by WFP for the patient and their family. The OVCs receive antiretroviral (ARV) medication which is very toxic, especially to the body of a weak child. Food and nutritional support are needed for the ARVs to work effectively. We also visited the home of a WFP beneficiary living in the slum. To reach the home, it was necessary to navigate through the rows of homes via muddy pathways - there are no roads in Kibera. The homes were made from a combination of mud and small branches and the rooftops were made from random pieces of tin. It had recently rained which made the paths even more difficult to maneuver. We slipped and squashed through inches of mud and feces. The slum has a combination of open sewers and “flying toilets” (plastic bags used for waste then thrown in the paths or on rooftops). The home of the WFP beneficiary was approximately 10’ by 10’ (one of the larger homes) and included one small bed, a small cupboard, a few cooking utensils and stools. Ten family members live in this space. Ruth, the 31-year-old mother of a WFP beneficiary, lives with her seven-year-old daughter (a Lea Toto patient), her sister, mother and various extended family members. The husbands have all died, most likely from HIV/AIDS. Ruth is also HIV-positive and receives ARVs at a nearby clinic. She washes clothes for a meager $1/day, yet is unable to work when it is cold due to her illness. Ruth expressed her gratitude for the food and nutrition supplements given to her family from WFP. Her daughter is strong and responding well to the ARV treatment. Next, we visited a WFP school meals program at Stara Primary School, also in Kibera. The school meals program began at Stara in 2004. There are only 13 teachers for 538 students. Seventy percent of the students are full orphans (both parents have died) and many of the others have only one parent. The school has seen an increase in school enrollment and attendance since the school meals program began. For most of the children, this is the only meal they eat each day. The teachers noticed an increase in attention and academic achievement after the school meals program began. The programs we visited today demonstrated the challenges faced by the poor in Kenya. Although these programs are improving the lives of many, there is still much work to be done. Holly Schade
Friends of the World Food Program, Princeton Committee
Twenty-five years ago, more than 1 million Ethiopians perished in a severe famine caused by conflict, drought and other factors. Today, Ethiopia has requested emergency aid to feed 6.2 million people as they struggle to deal with a five-year drought and avoid another major crisis.
 According to Mitiku Kassa, Ethiopia's State Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development, the number of Ethiopians needing emergency assistance jumped from 4.9 million at the beginning of 2009 to 6.2 million today. In addition to drought, high food prices and the global economic crisis have made it difficult for many poor Ethiopians to access food. Although around 80 percent of the population lives off of agriculture, some 85 percent of Ethiopia's farmland has been damaged by bad farming practices and erosion.
The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) operates several food assistance programs in Ethiopia designed to improve the skills, education and productivity of the country's poorest people. WFP's School Meals program provides children with a nutritious daily meal at school, improving their concentration in class and increasing enrollment and attendance. The Food for Assets program reaches roughly 1.3 million Ethiopians each year, focusing on how to manage environmental resources to increase food productivity in areas where food is scarce.
Ethiopia is also one of the pilot countries for WFP's innovative Purchase for Progress (P4P) program. P4P allows WFP to purchase its food supplies locally from smallholder and low-income farmers. With a guaranteed buyer, farmers can produce more crops and earn more money, boosting the local economy in a way that benefits the entire community.
-Alli Bailey
Communications Assistant
Friends of WFP
The Millennium Villages project and the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) have recently announced that they will join forces to alleviate hunger and poverty in Africa. Their plan is to create “undernourishment-free zones” in the 80 Millennium Villages that span 10 different countries. They will focus on important measures such as school meal coverage, health education and assistance for smallholder farmers in increasing both income and productivity. 
WFP’s Executive Director Josette Sheeran states, “We must act now to build the partnerships and take the comprehensive steps necessary to win this fight. No one organization can do it alone, and we will leverage a growing collaboration with the Millennium Villages project to deliver powerful solutions to malnutrition.” The Millennium Villages project was formed as a response to the findings of the UN Millennium Project. It is led by the Earth Institute, Millennium Promise and the United Nations Development Program. Focusing on community development and self-empowerment to create a sustainable way of ending poverty, the Millennium Villages project combined with WFP techniques will have a positive impact on food security.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and Special Advisor to the UN Secretary General, adds, “The Millennium Villages will carry out the exciting interventions pioneered by WFP, and demonstrate that hunger and under-nutrition can be cut decisively through proven measures in agriculture, school meals, nutritional supplementation, food-for-work programs to build infrastructure, and other powerful WFP tools.”
The global economic crisis has made hunger an enormous concern worldwide, but WFP and the Millennium Villages project are rising to the challenge with a united effort. Read more about the Millennium Villages project. Read more about the partnership on WFP’s website.
-Sara Thomson
Outreach Intern
Friends of WFP
 In
his Op-Ed in Sunday’s New York Times, columnist
Nicholas Kristof wrote that, “The most decisive weapons in the war on
poverty aren’t transfer payments but education, education, education.”
The sad reality remains, however, that each day many parents must
choose between feeding their children and sending them to school. This
is especially true of countries in the midst of conflict or after a
natural disaster. How can we, in good conscience, tell these children
that education will open doors to opportunity when they are too hungry
to concentrate on learning how to read and write?
This
is where the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) offers
a solution. Education and hunger relief should not be competing
objectives, and one of the ways that WFP ensures that they are not is
through the School Meals program. The School Meals program provides
parents with incentives to send their children, especially daughters,
to school. In many countries, when a girl attends school for at least
20 days each month, WFP rewards her family with a take-home ration of
food. As the Friends of WFP website explains, the take-home
ration of food, “can be eaten by the family or sold to make up for the
loss of the girl’s labor at home.” In 2008,
20.5 million schoolchildren received school meals or take-home rations
thanks to WFP.
The School Meals program not only addresses child hunger, but also
tackles the challenge of improving rates of school attendance in the
developing world. Jacques Diouf, the director-general of the United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), recently said that,
“The food crisis has taught us that to defeat hunger, we have to deal
with its root causes.” Programs like the School Meals program deal with both the effects of
hunger, by providing nutritious meals to children, and its root causes,
by making education more accessible, especially for girls.
-Brooke Barron
Outreach Intern
Friends of WFP
 On May 17, Daly Belgasmi, WFP regional director for the Middle East, Central Asia and Eastern Europe, met with Abdul-Karim al-Arhabi, minister of planning and international cooperation for the Yemeni government. The meeting consisted of a briefing about WFP operations in Yemen and how WFP can coordinate with the Yemeni government.
The minister emphasized the importance of WFP School Meals program to help break the cycle of hunger and poverty in Yemen. Currently, over 40 percent of the Yemeni population lives on less than $2 a day. WFP is feeding an average of 96,000 female students in 1,300 schools through the School Meals program in a five-year project set to end in 2011. Among its other work in Yemen, WFP also provides assistance to more than 30,000 of the most vulnerable refugees who escaped to Yemen from the Somali civil war.
When WFP works in developing countries, the goal is to always build capacity within the community, promote self-sufficiency and eventually transfer the management of these programs over the local government. Yemen is just another example of how WFP looks to work with the local people and government to accomplish their mission.
-Brian J. Ward
Outreach Associate
Friends of WFP
The Enguike
primary school in Tanzania is a good example of how great a difference the World Food Program’s (WFP) school meal program can make in the education and everyday life of undernourished children.
 Prior to 2003, when the School Meals program was instituted in Enguike, the pass rate on entry exams for the secondary school was close to zero, meaning that few, if any students graduated primary school. In an interview with the World Food Program, George Lowassa, district coordinator for the WFP school meals program, remembers “You would find the children fast asleep because they were so hungry and tired.” According to Lowassa, many students had to walk up to 7.5 miles on an empty stomach in order to get to school each day. In 2003 with the help of WFP, students at the primary school were given a morning snack and cooked lunch each day that they attended school. The positive effects of the school meals program were evident by 2004; half of the 18 student class passed their exams and graduated to the secondary school. By 2005 attendance, enrollment and the pass rate were even better, with 36 students out of a class of 38 passing their exams and continuing onto the secondary school. Many families in the region rely on maize crops as their main source of income and nutrition. When there is a poor harvest or a drought, parents and their children suffer the consequences. For many of the students in Enguike, the meal they receive at school is the largest and most nutritious meal of the day. It is remarkable the great effect that one snack and one meal can make in a child’s daily life and moreover in their education. Therefore, it is important to engage our communities here in the United States on the work of the World Food Program and the campaign to alleviate global hunger so that we can help to make sure that students everywhere, not just in Enguike, receive enough food to concentrate and succeed in their education.
-Devinne Mack
Outreach Intern
Friends of WFP
April showers have certainly brought good news to Zimbabwe so far; who knows what May will bring! One source of good news is that the food situation has started to improve with the advent of the harvest. Many citizens of Zimbabwe live in rural areas, and are therefore dependent on maize and other subsistence crops for nutrition.
On the downside, Richard Lee, the World Food Program’s (WFP) public information officer for southern Africa, said “However, we are likely to have a poor harvest this year. We still do not know exactly how poor it will be. But, it is likely to be poor.” A bad harvest will likely affect citizens in the most rural and impoverished regions in Zimbabwe, meaning that WFP’s large-scale assistance program that ran until the end of March, will likely need to resume again in the coming months or at the very least by early 2010.
According to VOA news, WFP says that, “Zimbabwe's decision to peg its currency to the U.S. dollar and the South African rand also has made more food available in the markets.” This decision has made food more available in urban areas because people are able to purchase food products using foreign currency.
WFP provided a great amount of food assistance in Zimbabwe during the worst period of the cholera epidemic. In total, the United Nations stated that there have been more than 4,000 deaths from cholera, and more than 95,000 cases of cholera. Thankfully, Lee asserts that the worst period of the cholera epidemic has passed, and in fact some treatment centers are even closing down.
About 600,000 people across Zimbabwe continue to be aided by WFP’s social safety net programs; most of whom are people affected by HIV/AIDS, orphans, or children enrolled in school receiving meals through WFP’s school meals program. Hopefully the number of people affected by cholera will continue to decrease, and the amount of food available will continue to increase with the currency adjustment. Maybe May will bring a better harvest than expected, and WFP’s only presence in Zimbabwe will be for social safety net programs.
-Devinne Mack
Outreach Intern
Friends of the World Food Program
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