Kenyan children may lose free school meals, UN agency warns

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned today that one million Kenyan children would stop receiving free school meals within six weeks unless donations for the project are made immediately.

WFP issued a statement saying it needs $15 million to provide the free meals to schoolchildren in Kenya’s poorest areas next year, and that without the money, it would have to discontinue the programme by January.

WFP’s country director for Kenya, Tesema Negash, said the free meals are a key incentive for Kenyan children to attend school. For many children in the country’s most arid regions, the school lunch is their only meal of the day.

“Some schools may simply be left without pupils and be forced to close their doors. The gravity of this situation must be understood, and responded to now if we are going to safeguard this generation of children,” he said.

The school meal programme run by the WFP has been operating in Kenya since 1980, and Mr. Negash said it costs the WFP “just cents a day” to a feed a school child in the east African country.