2/3/2012 12:00 AM
Providing food-insecure students with nutritional supplements at school is something that can play a catalytic role in incentivizing increased attendance and enrollment. Land O’Lakes International Development has learned this over the past decade of implementing such programs in 9 countries, feeding more than 1.7 million children.
But in what ways might the impact change if the commodities and processing for the nutritional supplements took place directly in the countries where the assistance was needed instead of the usual practice of shipping, distributing and/or monetizing U.S. commodities? Was there any chance it could have a negative market impact? Might it improve farmers’ livelihoods? Or could it perhaps even improve local processors’ capacity, and better prepare food-insecure countries to respond to development challenges independently?
To find out, the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded Land O’Lakes $2.6 million to begin an important one-year pilot initiative in Bangladesh designed to determine the viability of using Local and Regional Procurement (LRP) for development-related food assistance. USDA also awarded Land O’Lakes a $3.6 million LRP in Zambia, which is reaching about 60,000 people in 10,000 HIV-affected Orphan and Vulnerable Children households.
Through the Bangladesh Local and Regional Procurement Pilot (BLPP), Land O'Lakes provided daily cereal bar snacks to around 100,000 students and teachers in 441 primary schools in three extremely poor sub-districts in the northern district of Jamalpur. The program involved procuring more than 17 million fortified, locally processed cereal bars consisting of 687 metric tons of nutritious, whole grain food ingredients, including puffed rice, chickpeas, peanuts and sesame seeds.
Not only did the program enable increased attendance and enrollment rates similar to previous efforts – an increase of about 27 percent – but there were many other positive impacts. Compared to the average year-long timeframe after contract signing that it takes to provide food aid through in-kind imports, food-insecure students had nutritious and tasty snacks every day, only two months after the BLPP program was launched. Additionally, 76 percent of parents surveyed at the end of the project felt that the cereal bars were the most effective incentive for encouraging their children to attend school.
Read more in the November/December Issue of growingtogether® Magazine, page 24-25 >>
