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Global Food for Education Program
Special Emphasis on Girls
The GFE program positively impacted school enrollment and access for girls, with WFP-administered programs reporting an 11.7-percent increase in the enrollment of girls, and PVO-administered programs reporting a 5.69-percent increase.
Both the WFP and the PVOs have innovative take-home ration programs as a way of using food aid to help motivate parents to allow their daughters to attend classes. Basic food items, such as a sack of rice or several liters of vegetable oil, are distributed to families of daughters attending school. These take-home rations compensate parents for the loss of the daughter’s labors and enable the girls to remain in school. PVOs carried out this take-home ration program in Honduras, Benin, Uganda, and Yemen. WFP operated such programs in Cameroon, Chad, Ghana, Guinea, Nepal, Pakistan, and Uganda.
In Pakistan, the WFP addressed the gender gap in targeted provinces by distributing vegetable oil monthly to the family of each female student attending school for a minimum of 20 days. Vegetable oil is an important part of the local diet, and families consider it precious. This particular project achieved a 32-percent increase in enrollment of girls in the GFE schools.
The CRS project in Benin reported a 10.5-percent increase in enrollment by girls, using school feeding and take-home rations for girls.
In Cameroon, the WFP school-feeding program increased the number of girls receiving take-home rations by an additional 3,571 girls. During the year, enrollment increased by an average of 36 percent in some participating schools. Overall, girls’ enrollment increased by more than 27 percent during the period, while dropout rates decreased significantly.
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