Report by Alpha Daffae Senkpeni, [email protected]
Southeastern Liberia – There is a noticeable decline in the attendance of students at several elementary schools in the Southeastern counties of Liberia due to a long pause on the supply of food to schools in the region.
During a recent reporting tour of River Cess, Sinoe, Grand Kru and Maryland Counties, a FrontPage Africa reporter gathered from several teachers and principals that the school meal program contributes immensely to keep pupils in school.
The Ministry of Education has been collaborating with the World Food Program (WFP) and Mary’s Meals International to run the school feeding programs across the country.
The school feeding program began in 1968 with few schools benefiting from the program but later extended to several other schools across the country.
However, the civil crisis halted the process, until it was reintroduced a couple of years ago.
The purpose of the school feeding in Liberian schools is to increase enrolment, attendance, retention and completion rates of students in schools, the Ministry of Education stated in a release in April this year.
“The school feeding will encourage parents to enroll their children to access affordable, quality and relevance education,” the release said.
“It also alleviates short-term hunger to improve learning capacity and outcomes. Foods provided to children during the school days improve children’s performance in cognitive tasks. Children who are hungry in the class are more likely to encounter difficulty in concentrating complex tasks even if they are otherwise well nourished.”
But for over three months now, many schools in these southeastern counties have not been supplied while others were lucky to have last received supplies in December 2017.
“It is affecting the learning process so bad – the children used to stay on campus when there was food but now most of them will either run away from campus or don’t come to school at all,” says Joseph Allison, Principle of Boryibie Public School in Harper, Maryland County.
The school has 159 students – 98 males and 159 females – but has seen a huge irregularity of students’ attendance ever since the food supply ran out.
“From Monday to Wednesday, sometimes we will have a total of 150 students in class but because the feeding program has stopped, the number is dropping. Sometimes we have 100 or 120 in school,” Allison explained.
“Many of the students will sneak to go home during recess because there’s no food program now on the campus.”
Many parents leave their children home and head to the village for farming, so the hot meal program has helped keep students in class, some teachers said.
“It was like something that was helping to keep the children in school because these children parents cannot afford to give them recess money,” explains Principal Braston S. Barker of the A. Dash Wilson Elementary School located a couple of miles outside Harper City.
At the Little Wlehgbo School also outside Harper City, there are many students who are Ivorian refugees.
Some trekked and crossed a river to school daily and once in school they have no means of getting food, explains Annie Slewion, the school principal.
“When they get home their parents are on the farm so fetching food becomes a problem,” she adds.
“Because of the absence of the hot meal we’ve noticed that enrollment of the ECD (early child development) has dropped; many younger students are staying away from school.”
Slewion could not give stats on the slump in daily attendance but said pupils are complaining regularly about the lack of food supplies.
In Grand Kru County, some schools were lucky to receive food supply in late December 2017.
At the George Toe Washington school in Barclayville where there are 390 students, supply has been running out, and by April this year, it was expected to be finished.
Joseph Manu is the principal of the school; he is afraid that once supply runs out the students will feel the impact.
“We are managing the food for the students but once it finishes and we don’t hear from the WFP people we will not know what to do again,” he said.
In a recent press release, the Ministry of Education said the feeding program impacts approximately 241,146 beneficiaries in 1,802 schools across the country.
It named the WFP and Mary Meals International as its partners and said it is collaborating with the UN agency to pilot the homegrown school-feeding program in 12 schools in Nimba County.
In October 2016, the WFP announced that lack of funding was impeding the school feeding program in Liberia, suggesting that it was going to drastically scale down the program if additional resources are not made available by the end of that year.
On Tuesday, May 29, a Source at the Ministry confirmed to FPA that all collaborating partners are expected to meet on Friday, June 1 to discuss the status of the feeding program in the country.