Community-Driven School Feeding Programme

COMMUNITY-DRIVEN SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMME

by Wilson Damien Asibu, Malawi

Malawi like many other sub-Saharan Africa countries is very hit by HIV and AIDS. One of the resulting effect is the increasing number of orphans due to death of parents from AIDS. In additional absenteeism, repetition, drop out, forced early marriages, early pregnancies are common to most children due to poverty and the impact of HIV and AIDS. The most affected are girls, who mostly carry on the burden of caring for their siblings, whilst cultures of promoting boy education perpetuates the problem further. One strategy in Malawi used by both the government and development partners has been the introduction of School Feeding Programme (SFP) which aims at reducing absenteeism, repetition, drop out poor performance, early pregnancies and early marriages of poverty-stricken and HIV and AIDS affected children in Malawi. This support comes to selected schools and provides food and nutritional materials for porridge to students. Funds in Milions of U$ dollars are used annaully to cater for this. Whilst school feeding programmes have spread regionally, an analysis of such programmes in Malawi and South Africa indicates that despite their health, education and poverty reduction goals, the programmes are not adequately linked to wider agrarian policies and are often localized, vertically provided and inconsistent (Tomlinson, 2007).

Generally, local farmers have not been supported with resources and opportunities to provide schools with food products. The New partnership for African Development's (NEPAD) comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP et al, 2003) includes a flagship homegrown school feeding programme that emphasises stimulating local food production but this recommendation has not yet been implemented (Tomlinson, 2007).

My idea is the introduction of a home-grown, community-driven school feeding programme, in which an organization like Country Minders for Peoples Development, working in the communities will support communities/schools with seeds, inputs, best farming methods technics with the support of local agricultural officials for communities to plant soya and beans, maize, groundnuts, etc whose proceeds will be harvested, and used for the school feeding programme and some will be sold to buy cooking utensils and materials, buy additives like sugar, salt, milk, etc as well as for an incentive for those local committees involved in running the programme as well as women preparing the food for the children.

This means that funding will be providing to this community-driven school-feeding programme one and for all. Secondly, it will bring in community ownership as they will decide whether to scale it up or what kind of food they want to provide to their children. Thirdly, it will reduce the heavy continued funding to schools for the school feeding programme by ninety percent and save billions of dollars, which could be chanelled to other deserving education areas like infrastructure, teaching and learning materials (TLM), teacher development, etc.

This intiative will not only serve Malawi, but other countries in Africa that are likewise implementing the School Feeding Programme with donor funds. One it is not sustainable, secondly, it is too costly and if this initiative is implemented it these funds could be channeled to other areas that could make a great improvement in the education sector as well.