Final: The WFP country program in Guinea was approved in 2001. Education efforts and project activities, however, were interrupted by rebel incursions in 2000-2001 and school feeding operations started during the 2001-2002 school year. While the conflict displaced up to 300,000 Guineans, WFP’s school feeding operations were able to help these children and their families reestablish their lives in Upper and Middle Guinea. By the end of 2002, food security conditions in many of the affected areas had been stabilized.

Since the program started, WFP has received letters from school directors expressing gratitude and support for the project and feedback from local authorities confirms the program’s success. In total, 54,242 children received a daily hot lunch in 311 schools in 2002 and 6,508 girls received take-home rations.

Particular progress has been made in the Kankan region where WFP has focused on developing partnerships with NGOs operating in the education sector. Last year, WFP signed agreements with four local NGOs and one international group. WFP’s partnership with Africare has led to considerable success in 20 WFP-assisted schools in the Dinguiraye area. WFP has also approached USAID, since the agency supports a large education program involving several NGOs. However, no partnership has been established to date.

Beneficiaries live in the most rural and remote food-insecure areas of Guinea. Agricultural production in these areas is insufficient to meet most household needs. Without WFP assistance, children and especially girls, fall victim to short-term hunger and must travel long distances to school without breakfast.

Once girls reach the fourth grade, it is customary for families to remove them from school to help work at home. This occurs because families seldom have the means to keep their children enrolled in primary school through an entire education cycle. The Government has recognized the problem and is working to increase primary school attendance rates. These efforts will also improve the overall quality of education and will be carried out through policies dictated by the Programme of Adjustment of the Educational Sector (PASE).

Currently, WFP and the Government are in the process of analyzing findings from a recent WFP vulnerability and food security assessment. Preliminary results indicate the need for targeted school feeding operations in parts of the country that are not currently served. Food-insecure areas are remote and difficult to access and financial and material support are often insufficient or unavailable. Nonetheless, WFP is working to expand operations in these areas.

Midterm: Enrollment levels for the Guinea WFP program have increased every year for the past three years. This program has made significant in-roads for girls in the educational system and has triggered an enrollment increase in higher grade levels. Additionally, the number of teachers has increased over the last year and reduced the student-to-teacher ratio.

In Guinea, the spillover effects from the ongoing civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone have created some 300,000 refugees, mainly in the country’s southeastern region. The difficult situation is compounded by widespread poverty among the population. According to the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) Human Development Report for 2000, Guineans have an average life expectancy of 54 years and an illiteracy rate of 65%. The country’s annual gross national product (GNP) is $570 per person, and approximately 40% of its population lives in absolute poverty.

Of the children who do go to school, many drop out at the end of the third year when they are transferred to schools that are often far away from their home villages. In Guinea, children habitually return home at midday to have lunch and prefer to stay home rather than walk the long distance back to school in the afternoon. In all regions, and especially during the fourth year of elementary school, girls are more likely to drop out, stay away or arrive late to school. This generally occurs because of the responsibilities girls have in household chores or economic activities, such as caring for livestock.

Final: USDA contributed commodities arrived in Conakry in August 2002, in time for distribution during the 2002- 2003 school year. The commodities included 828 MT of rice, 230 MT of Corn-Soya Blend and 350 MT of vegetable oil.

In September, WFP transported the commodities from Conakry to the country’s three sub-offices using commercial trucks. The agency delivered the food to all 311 participating schools using its own trucks in October. WFP must use its own trucks when a country’s commercial sector lacks suitable transport. A total of 704 MT of food was distributed in 2002 in addition to some 250 pots, 60 ladles and 20,000 spoons and plates.

An additional USDA contribution totaling 129 MT of peas arrived in January 2003. Distribution will continue into the 2003-2004 school year.

Midterm: GFEI donations did not arrive in time for distribution during the 2001-2002 school year. In order to bridge this shortfall, WFP Guinea borrowed contributions from other donors until GFEI donations were available.

Final: In addition to an on-going WFP emergency school feeding initiative which uses resources from the agency’s regional relief and recovery operation, the USDA-supported school feeding effort provides food to primary school children in Upper and Middle Guinea. The program supports the Government of Guinea’s "Education for All" by 2015 program that aims to increase primary school enrollment rates by 8% per year.

The school feeding program targets rural primary students where enrollment rates are lowest. Operations are active in Labé and Dabola in Middle Guinea and in Kouroussa, Mandiana, and Siguiri in the Kankan region. These areas are home to the poorest prefectures in education and income. The Kankan region ranks the lowest in the country with only 44% of the country’s students enrolling in primary school. For girls, it is even lower and only reaches 31%.

The program is designed to help sustain school children with a hot lunch and to support girls education in primary schools. Take-home rations are used as an incentive to encourage girls to stay in school and target girls in grades four through six. In order to receive the ration, girls cannot exceed more than three absences per month.

The school lunch generally consists of 150 grams of rice, 30 grams of peas, and 10 grams of oil. These commodities are supplemented with salt, meat and other condiments furnished by the school’s parent association. In some schools, breakfasts containing 30 grams of corn-soy blend are provided instead of 30 grams of peas during lunch.

The parents’ association at each school is in charge of distributing the take-home rations. When the mothers collect the tins of oil, the association takes the opportunity to discuss the importance of girls’ education with them. The parents’ association at each school manages the canteen. This includes construction; recruiting cooks and other personnel; supplying condiments, wood and soap; and meal preparation. Under the program, dry ration are provided to all cooks. At least half of the committee members are female to further ensure women’s participation in the program.

Members of the parent’s association are trained to gradually take over the management of the school canteen. As they become more skilled in the daily operations and requirements for operating the canteen, WFP will gradually phase out daily support.

Midterm: Emergency school feeding is provided for food-insecure individuals in areas facing high malnutrition. These safety net programs also encourage communities to create sustainable assets and become more self-reliant. The ration level for emergency feeding is 628 kilocalories.

The WFP program in Guinea is scheduled to operate from 2002 through 2005. It aims to support national poverty reduction policies, improve food security and reduce gender disparities. The program’s goals include:

In order to achieve those objectives, the program will work to increase primary school enrollment and attendance in rural areas and promote community rural development in extremely poor areas.

Food aid is used as an instrument to fight hunger and poverty in the poorest rural areas of the country. It helps alleviate hunger in school children and rural populations, especially during the lean season, and works to improve their long-term food security. It addresses the root cause of poverty and helps poor, food-insecure households invest in their children’s education.

Immediate objectives are as follows:

Final: WFP is working with the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) to implement income-generating agricultural projects in areas with school feeding activities. The project will help maximize the benefits of the school feeding program and enhance the project’s impact. Since October 2001, Kankan's rural income-generating program has been able to supply 46 MT of dry rations to 727 people. The project includes 673 women in 24 gardening collectives in Siguiri. The office is now selecting pilot groups that will furnish produce to their children's school canteens.

Another partnership is being developed with the Peace Corps. Under the agreement, Peace Corps Volunteers work with the parent committees and community members to help sensitize them about the value of education and the difference it can make in their children’s lives as well as their own.

Final: The majority of the families in the communities with WFP school feeding activities are unable to meet their nutritional needs for the entire year. When there is nothing to eat, school and the importance of education becomes secondary to the family’s survival.

This is especially difficult during the lean season, when food stocks from the preceeding year have been depleted and the new harvest has not yet begun. WFP’s school feeding program becomes critical during these times and remains important throughout the year in Guinea.

The school feeding program works to lift some of the main barriers facing Guinea’s education system today. Participating schools have reported decreases in afternoon absenteeism, improved grades, regular atttendance, and increased levels of energy among students since the program started.

At the same time, female participation in the parent associations is stimulating parental interest in education and providing mothers with important health, hygiene and food safety skills that are being implemented at home.

The school feeding program also effectively offsets some of the expenses parents incur when they send their children to school. These include the direct cost of supplies and uniforms, but also the indirect costs from the loss of labor that otherwise would contribute to the family income.

In 2003, WFP conducted a follow-up evaluation to the baseline survey it performed before starting school feeding operations in Guinea. The data will be used to measure program impact and provide information ranging from enrollment and attendance data and health and sanitation information to school infrastructure, teacher certification and other sources of external assistance. The project will benefit from a recently-awarded grant to help establish a results-based monitoring and evaluation system. Results from the baseline survey will be available in 2004.

Midterm: School meals provide children with the calories that they often lack. The additional calories increase their participation in school. In the long-term, school meals help primary school children become more attentive, reduce their absenteeism, and improve their ability to retain what they are taught.

Food aid provides a dietary supplement to targeted school children and helps them remain in the school system through elementary school. The meal also saves children from returning home to eat lunch—often a distance of several kilometers on foot—and reduces absenteeism in the afternoon.

Through the provision of dry rations, parents are encouraged to enroll their daughters in school and keep them there. Rations represent an income transfer to family budgets and improve the food security of households.

WFP assistance has increased the involvement of parents and of village communities in running their schools through the creation of school friends and parents’ associations, which train members to manage their school canteens.

WFP Gives Kids Food for Thought in Guinea's Rural Schools. Stomach already grumbling, a young Guinean boy puts on his khaki uniform and hits the dusty road to school. By noon, hunger has stolen his attention from the chalkboard. When class breaks he will walk home for lunch and stay there rather than make the 5 kilometer trip back to school. His sisters, however, have never seen the inside of a classroom. They stay at home to help wash clothes, clean the house and help coax a meager crop from the dry savannah soil while their parents work in the gold mines and cotton fields.

These children have thousands of names and faces as this is the story of countless families in rural Kankan, Guinea. But thanks to WFP's school feeding program, their story has a happier ending. Launched in 2002, the program targets rural primary schools where enrollment rates, especially those of girls, are the lowest in the country. It operates in Middle and Upper Guinea, the nation's poorest regions with the lowest levels of income, food production, consumption and little education. In Kankan, the program serves Kouroussa, Mandiana and Siguiri, three of Guinea's 11 poorest prefectures.

To prevent afternoon absenteeism and boost concentration, students are served a hearty lunch of rice, peas, and oil provided by WFP. Meat, vegetables or other condiments are supplied by the community when they are available.

Girls in grades 4 through 6 with good attendance receive four liters of vegetable oil as a monthly take-home ration. The supplemental food provision entices parents to send their daughters to school, lightens the economic burden of securing food, and boosts a girl's status within her family.

While school meals address short-term hunger, the program helps students escape food insecurity. It helps children, especially girls, get the education that is needed to eventually break the cycle of poverty and the inheritance of hunger. A 2001 UNICEF study showed that an infant born from an uneducated mother is twice as likely to die as a child whose mother has some post-primary education. Another international study showed that raising the education rate by a single percent translated into a two-year increase in a country's life expectancy rate. The WFP program works to make the national government's goal for universal primary education by 2015 a reality.

Building Canteens and Community. The straw-roofed mud hut looks like any other shelter one finds in Tintinsabani and the other villages of Siguiri. Yet this canteen has united a community in the name of education and food security. The parents and friends of Tintinsabani's students run the canteen. They constructed the facility, recruited cooks, continue to secure condiments, and cook student meals. Each parent contributes at least 500 GF a month to pay for meat, salt and other condiments that supplement WFP's donations. Cooks also receive monthly rations of cooking oil for preparing the meals during the school week.

Lancé Sangaré, secretary of the school's parent association responsible for the canteen, said the school feeding program has changed the school environment. "The canteen has chased hunger from our school," said Sangaré. "The students now come to school and stay here."

The Tintinsabani Primary School covers five villages. Some students must walk as far as seven kilometers on an empty stomach in order to reach the school. Students often arrive hungry, having consumed their energy on their way to class, Sangaré explained.

The program has also improved student-teacher relations, as students are more enthusiastic about their studies, according to Mamaolou Doumbouya, Siguiri's Education Director. "Providing breakfast has been key to the program's success, as short-term hunger seriously hampered the kids' ability to learn," said Doumbouya.

The WFP program has been so successful, Doumbouya says, that the district has a new, albeit positive, problem on its hands. General school enrollment in Siguiri rose from 57% to 60% in the past year, a trend Doumbouya directly attributes to WFP's presence. As enrollment rates continue to rise, Doumbouya is working to prevent overcrowded classrooms and secure enough teachers to handle the influx of students. Other Kankan-area schools have reported attendance rates climbing to as high as 98% after the school feeding program began.

Parents are pleased with increased enrollment and improved grades. One parent, Adama Keita, told WFP his daughter’s academic performance increased over the last year. When Keita sees his daughter’s achievements, he is proud of her and wants her to continue her studies.

In the 2002-2003 school year, WFP Kankan plans to feed 7,662 students, including 2,673 girls, in 50 Siguiri schools. The program will also serve 10,410 students, including 3,752 girls, in 77 schools in Mandiana and Kouroussa. The number of female beneficiaries will certainly rise as the school feeding program takes hold and more parents like Mr. Keita will enroll their daughters so they too can reap the benefits.

From scanty rains to a stagnant economy, the problems faced by Siguiri’s rural people are far from simple. But watching Tintinsabani’s school children plow through their porridge and happily run off to class, one can’t help but get a flash of hope. Someday the youths will have to take on those challenges, and its education that will help this generation tackle them.