Events

Drawing on the expertise of business communities to strengthen HGSF programmes, Oct 2010

Injecting better business ethos

October 7-8, 2010, UCLA Anderson School of Management

World Food Prize Laureate, Senator McGovern joined leading HGSF stakeholders and business experts at UCLA to explore ways in which HGSF programmes could benefit from skills and expertise of the business community.

Senator McGovern with Dr Drake and the PCD team

Yamoussoukro Colloquium 1-3 July, 2010

School Feeding-Contributing to Sustainable Development in Africa

The Yamoussoukro Colloquium offered a chance to study in-depth the Ivoirian school feeding model, which centres on working with women’s farming groups to improve local production, increase community buy-in and provide food for the school canteens. The meeting brought together national and international partners to discuss the remarkable successes and lesson learned in 20 years of experience in Cote d’Ivoire.

The primary lessons are that:

Involving the community at all levels results in buy-in and sustainability;
Supporting communities to increase their agricultural inputs results in real gains. Communities now provide 23% of the food used in school feeding in Cote d’Ivoire;
Working with women’s groups allows for the maximum impact among rural farmers (of whom 82% are women) and improves the lifestyle of women by providing household income (in one village 15% of household income came from women in the group that supported school feeding);
There is need for a strong Francophone network to capitalize on information sharing and lessons learned to disseminate programme successes.

Feed Minds, Change Lives: February 10 2011

Feed Minds, Change Lives: School Feeding, Health, Nutrition and Agriculture

February 10 2011

Side event to Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition & Health International Conference New Delhi, India

Child development requires a life-cycle approach to intervention. School health and nutrition programmes are a key part of this continuum, providing the foundation for physical, cognitive and educational development that will allow children to reach their full and equal potential. The recent food, fuel and financial crises have highlighted the importance of school feeding programmes, both as a social safety net for children living in poverty and food insecurity, and as part of national educational policies and plans.

Today, perhaps for the first time in history, every country for which we have information is seeking to provide food, in some way and at some scale, to its schoolchildren. However, where the need is greatest, in terms of hunger, poverty and poor social indicators, the programmes tend to be the smallest. Past experience shows that countries do not seek to exit from providing food to their schoolchildren, but rather to transition from externally supported projects to nationally owned programmes. Countries that have made a successful transition have often explored linking school feeding programmes to agriculture development –an approach also known as "Home Grown School Feeding" (HGSF).

2010 Global Child Nutrition Forum, June 2010

In the largest meeting of its kind, over 130 of the world’s leading school feeding experts came together for the Global Child Nutrition Forum held in Accra, Ghana in June 2010. The theme for the Forum was “The Multi-sectoral Approach: Linking School Health and Nutrition, School Feeding and Local Agricultural Production. “ GCNF delegates in Accra, Ghana, June

Forum participants were there to discuss to how school feeding and in particular home grown school feeding (HGSF) can promote local agricultural development by providing smaller holder farmers access to stable markets whilst at the same time improving the education and nutrition of school children.

A major part of this discussion was the opportunity not only to hear about about the research and expertise of the renowned keynote speakers but also for delegates to share their own countries experiences and approach to school feeding.

To faciliate the exchange of ideas and experiences participants from each of the 18 countries represented at the Forum gave presentations on their current national school feeding policies and programmes. These presentations can be downloaded by clicking the following links: Angola, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cape Verde, Chile, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Laos, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Russia, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda.

The Forum co-sponsored by Partnership for Child Development (PCD) and Global Child Nutrition Foundation (GCNF) consisted of presentations and panel discussions on strengthening the linkages between school feeding and agricultural and community development.

Key themes addressed during the Forum included:

HGSF Regional Technical Meeting, Nairobi, March 2010

Leading school feeding stakeholders from across Africa, Asia, Europe and America came together for the inaugural Home Grown School Feeding (HGSF) Regional Technical Meeting held at KEMRI research institute in Nairobi in early March 2010.

The HGSF meeting brought together country teams from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Mali and Cote d’Ivoire and key HGSF stakeholders to share their experiences of good practice and use this knowledge to identify and develop tools and to determine levels of support needed to enable the on-going development of effective, sustainable and locally-run HGSF programmes.

Throughout the meeting, the delegates underscored the timeliness of HGSF. The current food, fuel and financial crises has highlighted the importance of school feeding programmes as a key social safety net for children in communities living in poverty and food insecurity.

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