Coalition launched to provide school lunches to global needy

UN: Over 60 Governments and 50 U.N. agencies and organizations have joined forces to press for the restoration of school lunches for all 388 million primary school children who were receiving the meals before the COVID-19 pandemic.

They also will push for school meals to be started for 73 million vulnerable youngsters who weren’t getting them before the coronavirus struck in early 2020.

Led by France and Finland, the School Meals Coalition was officially launched at a U.N. event Tuesday with a longer-term goal of ensuring that every needy child in the world gets a nutritious school meal by 2030.

Finland’s UN Ambassador Jukka Salovaara, called school meals “a great social equalizer,” saying they “can really act as a social safety net within communities.”

Since the coalition was formed in September, he said, the support has been very encouraging, but “as the goal of the coalition is to reach all children by 2030 … we have to have a very broad participation.” In a joint declaration late Tuesday, five U.N. agencies threw their support behind the coalition’s campaign, saying school health and nutrition programs support the growth and development of school children and adolescents and “can help to combat child poverty, hunger and malnutrition in all its forms.”

“They attract children to school and support children’s learning, and long-term health and well-being,” said the declaration signed by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the U.N. Children’s Fund, the World Food Program and the World Health Organization.

According to the coalition, the 388 million students receiving lunch before the pandemic represented one out of every two primary school children worldwide.

Carmen Burbano, Director of the World Food Program’s school-based programmes, told reporters that by May 2020, 370 million of those children had lost access to the meals because schools closed, “so basically, all of these programs collapsed.”

Burbano said the 73 million children who weren’t getting meals before the pandemic are in 60 low income and lower middle income countries living in extreme poverty — 80% of them in Africa. Before COVID-19, she said, governments were spending between $40 billion and $50 billion annually from domestic budgets on school lunch programs, so the coalition’s first goal is calling on leaders to restore what they were doing before the pandemic.

Burbano said $4.7 billion would be needed to reach the 73 million children “that were falling through the cracks.”

– JAPAN TODAY