Ethiopia: School meals provide vital food support

Pupils eating nutirious food supplied by Plan

19 July 2011: Plan is providing vulnerable children in Ethiopia with school meals as part of its response to the  worsening food crisis. Many children are at risk of starvation and have fainted in class through lack of food, or dropped out of school altogether. 

In Addis Ababa alone, Plan has supported nearly 4,300 children in 79 primary schools and 33 pre-schools with regular meals over the last 3 months.

Children crying of hunger

“It is heart-breaking to see children crying of hunger while I teach,” says pre-school teacher, Meseret Yohannes. “Once when I was working with my children, a 6-year-old girl fainted and fell on the wall. I immediately took her to the nearby clinic. The nurse told me that it was hunger, not sickness.”  

Children are unable to concentrate on their school work when they are hungry and those who do not have any food often start fights trying to snatch food from other children. 

More attentive

Bethlhem, 12, says her HIV positive mother cannot work to cover the family’s food needs after her father died. “I often go to school without having my breakfast and taking lunch. How can I think about my lesson when I am hungry? After I started eating from the feeding programme I started to be more attentive.”  

Many families are struggling to provide even 1 meal a day as basic food items are scarce and food prices have soared. 

Bekelech Kabtamu a mother of 4 says her children walk a kilometre to return home for lunch, where they have just a glass of water with a few handfuls of roasted barley. “I cannot afford their lunch and the only option is to bring the children home and give them what I can afford,” says Bekelech.

Keeping children in school

The school feeding programmes encourage parents to keep their children in school and not send them out to work to get extra income. 

“I cannot cover the food need of my 4 children. However, after the feeding programme was launched, my children were saved from dropping out of school,” says Mekdes Alemu, a mother from Yeka sub-city. 

Plan is also supporting people in rural areas of Ethiopia and across East Africa where 10,000,000 people are at risk of starvation because of the food crisis. 

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