Visiting the field

Well, it’s probably about time that I tell you a little bit about what I’m actually doing here, at least in terms of my internship that is. As I mentioned in my last post, I’m working with the school feeding unit here at the World Food Programme. One of the main reasons why I chose to work with WFP in Kenya (as opposed to a WFP office somewhere else in the world) is because the Kenya country office is currently at the cutting edge in terms spearheading the organization’s transition away from being a food aid organization and towards one providing food assistance. What’s the difference you might ask? Well, the essence can be captured in the old Chinese proverb “give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for life”. In other words, it’s the difference between giving poor farmers a 1kg bag of imported corn from the U.S. to eat or giving them a 1kg bag of maize seeds and then empowering them to grow an abundant harvest on their own, which could produce 100kg of maize to then eat.

For the last 30 years, WFP has been running school feeding programs here in Kenya, very much fulfilling its mandate as a food aid organization. It would buy split peas from Canada or get imported corn from the U.S. and then distribute the food to schools for their feeding programs. And the program worked well – childhood hunger was prevented and primary school enrolment levels improved.

But over the last couple of years, WFP has started to develop a radically different perspective on this whole food aid thing. They’ve started to realize that perhaps it is time for the Kenyan government to take responsibility and ownership over feeding their nation’s school children. And perhaps it makes more sense to buy maize and pigeon peas from local Kenyan farmers rather than to import corn from the US and split peas from Canada. And perhaps school meals will only be effective if there is also school-wide health and sanitation services available, to ensure that preventable diseases such as dysentery don’t rob the children of the nutrients they would glean from the school meal in the first place. And of course all of these changes are in the name of ‘sustainability’. The good old s-word seems to have permeated all aspects of life these days.

So, all of this change in thinking came to the fore last summer in July when the Kenyan government launched a new initiative called Home-Grown School Feeding. This innovative program is now paving the way for eventual total government takeover of school feeding in Kenya – which is huge!! But in order to prepare for that transition to take place, a strategy is needed to figure out exactly how WFP will transfer all of its responsibilities over to the government.

And so that’s where I come in. I’ve been charged with the task of developing this strategy for WFP and the government. It’s the first time such a strategy has been developed by WFP and Kenya is the first country to do it, so the headquarters in Rome are eager to learn from our experience and then use us as a model for other countries. It’s all very exciting!

Anyway, to get some on-the-ground experience under my belt before delving too far into writing the strategy, I went on a field visit to some schools benefitting from the home-grown program. Here are a couple of photos I took along the way…