Food crisis 'threatening education goals'
Yojana Sharma
The goal to get all the world's children into school within the next seven years could be jeopardised by the global food crisis, even as the UN has reported progress in school enrolment in recent years.
Josette Sheeran, head of the UN's World Food Programme - which provides meals for some 20 million children in developing countries - said school meals in several countries may be cancelled because of rising prices for basic commodities.
Campaigners launching a week-long series of events in London to draw attention to the need to get more children in school in poor countries underlined the importance of school meals.
Colombian pop star Shakira said school meals in her native country had "proven to be a significant incentive for the parents to send their kids to school".
She said: "Adding the nutritional component to education reduces child labour, decreases malnutrition. And we have virtually no dropouts in our schools in Colombia, so it really works."
In Asia, WFP expanded its school feeding programme in recent years. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, cooking oil is provided to families as an incentive to send their daughters to school. In Bangladesh and Myanmar, rice and fish rations are provided.
But a programme providing school meals for 450,000 children in Cambodia had to be suspended recently as rice suppliers defaulted because of a shortage of grain.
Free school meals in other countries are also under threat, a WFP spokesman said.
An extra $11US billion per year was needed to provide quality primary education to all, the Global Campaign for Education's US director Gene Sperling said.
But this did not take into account the possibility that gains may be reversed if children drop out of school when school meals are withdrawn.
According to Unesco, the UN's heritage body, 72 million children are still not in school.
This compares well with the 96 million out of school in 1999, shortly before the 2000 Education for All goals of universal primary education by 2015 were launched.
Seven in 10 of children out of school live in Africa and Asia.
Unesco's 2008 Education for All Global Monitoring Report said more than 3 million children were still out of school in Southeast Asia.
Facing the greatest challenge are Vietnam, with a million out of school, and the Philippines, Burma, Thailand and Indonesia, with about half a million out of school in each country.
The goal to get all the world's children into school within the next seven years could be jeopardised by the global food crisis, even as the UN has reported progress in school enrolment in recent years.
Josette Sheeran, head of the UN's World Food Programme - which provides meals for some 20 million children in developing countries - said school meals in several countries may be cancelled because of rising prices for basic commodities.
Campaigners launching a week-long series of events in London to draw attention to the need to get more children in school in poor countries underlined the importance of school meals.
Colombian pop star Shakira said school meals in her native country had "proven to be a significant incentive for the parents to send their kids to school".
She said: "Adding the nutritional component to education reduces child labour, decreases malnutrition. And we have virtually no dropouts in our schools in Colombia, so it really works."
In Asia, WFP expanded its school feeding programme in recent years. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, cooking oil is provided to families as an incentive to send their daughters to school. In Bangladesh and Myanmar, rice and fish rations are provided.
But a programme providing school meals for 450,000 children in Cambodia had to be suspended recently as rice suppliers defaulted because of a shortage of grain.
Free school meals in other countries are also under threat, a WFP spokesman said.
An extra $11US billion per year was needed to provide quality primary education to all, the Global Campaign for Education's US director Gene Sperling said.
But this did not take into account the possibility that gains may be reversed if children drop out of school when school meals are withdrawn.
According to Unesco, the UN's heritage body, 72 million children are still not in school.
This compares well with the 96 million out of school in 1999, shortly before the 2000 Education for All goals of universal primary education by 2015 were launched.
Seven in 10 of children out of school live in Africa and Asia.
Unesco's 2008 Education for All Global Monitoring Report said more than 3 million children were still out of school in Southeast Asia.
Facing the greatest challenge are Vietnam, with a million out of school, and the Philippines, Burma, Thailand and Indonesia, with about half a million out of school in each country.
posted by John Carey at 7:05 PM
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