Hungry Malagasy children win boost from expanded UN school meals operation

Tens of thousands of poor children across southern Madagascar will start receiving nutritious daily meals in their classrooms under a new United Nations-backed effort to expand school feeding programmes in the Indian Ocean country.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said today that it will now supply meals to about 150,000 children in 883 schools in Toliara province after a $2.4 million injection of funds from the national Government.

This is a major improvement on the current figure of 60,000 children and 272 schools that receive meals under the WFP scheme.

Krystyna Bednarska, the agency’s representative in Madagascar, said the expanded school feeding programme will help the country move closer to achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of universal primary education.

Daily meals offer an enormous incentive for poor families in the developing world to send their children to school and commonly lead to drastically improved attendance rates.

“WFP strongly supports the Government’s policy of ‘Education for All’ and this generous contribution shows how committed it is to ensuring that children have access to one of their fundamental rights – education,” Ms. Bednarska said.