As inflation erodes people's purchasing power in Sierra Leone, WFP has introduced a better kind of school feeding, that empowers rural women to grow and supply surplus fresh foods.
The women of Tawuya farmers' group in Kambia district of north Sierra Leone like to sing as they work. Harvesting sweet potato leaves at sunset one Tuesday, their chorus praises the merits of working with the World Food Programme. WFP recently introduced its "home-grown" school feeding model here, whereby local farmers' groups are invited to grow crops for children's lunches.
"WFP created a means for us women to earn money regularly," says Adama, one of the group members. "It is hard to find money in Tawuya," she adds - and she should know as a mother of seven. "We come three times a week to pick potato leaves or eggplants, or peppers and cucumber. What the schools order is what we supply, then we get paid on Fridays."
Farmers supply the very school their children attend and where they work as cooks. This year, WFP trained 70 women here to prepare tastier, healthier, safer meals, by, for example, applying the right amount of oil and salt while not over-cooking the leaves.
I watch as the women quickly fill two buckets with mounds of leaves that are chopped and cooked with a touch of palm oil, peanut paste, dry fish particles, salt, onions, and fresh pepper. The dish is served with a cereal and legumes daily. Providing this daily meal creates an incentive for parents to send their children to school in one of the country's most food-insecure areas.
Indeed, it is hard to find money anywhere in Sierra Leone, one of the least developed countries in the world, having recently emerged from ten years of civil war and an Ebola outbreak that claimed 4,000 lives.
In June, Sierra Leone stood out in the region for its highest rise in food prices, at 62 percent, and fastest decline in local currency value, over the past five years.
Such developments, exacerbated by the Ukraine crisis, have eroded the purchasing power of Sierra Leone's consumers, leading to concerns over people's quality of life.
And women have fewer opportunities to prosper than men.
To stimulate local agriculture and improve children's nutrition through school feeding, the Government of Sierra Leone recently launched a school feeding policy emphasizing the homegrown model. WFP supported the development of this policy, then began this pilot, to guide and advise the Government what home-grown school feeding could look like.
WFP supports farmers' groups to grow more food while connecting them to a reliable market, the schools. WFP's approach encourages the community to fully participate in and own the programme so it can be sustained.
Schools here invite parents to contribute everything from vegetables to firewood to complement the staples foods they supply such as beans, rice and wheat.
But because many do not have the funds to buy vegetables, WFP supplies school with dedicated cash to ensure they appear on the children's plates.
The Tawuya women are therefore more capable of meeting some of their needs, than they were before the home-grown programme began. Plus they now have more food in the house, Adama says.
In addition to providing them with high-yield seeds, fertilizers, and farm tools, WFP taught the group how to make compost to nourish land organically. The soils of Sierra Leone are typically acidic and not conducive to growing crops including rice, which is a staple, and which the farmers' groups also supply to schools.
"We have sweet potatoes, eggplant, okra, maize and rice in the nursery over there," says Adama pointing. "Plus we have a large cassava garden a distance away from where we can harvest more leaves."
Fellow group member N'yayh Sankoh says, "The school works well for us mothers and we are happy."
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The women sing again as they hurry home before it gets dark, pacing through thickets, palm forest and patches of marsh. They only harvest at dusk.
They keep their harvest on the roof overnight so that it is fresh when they deliver it to the District Committee school early in the morning.
Come Friday, pay isn't much once distributed among the group's 24 members - typically, each one earns less than the equivalent of US$8. However, the women say, it has changed their lives.
WFP is implementing the home-grown programme in collaboration with the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the Government in 17 out of nearly 1,000 schools it supports with school feeding. It is a pilot intended to inform the Government, whose new school feeding policy emphasizes a transition to the home-grown model.
Read more about WFP's work in Sierra Leone
