This joint note from the World Food Programme (WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is aimed at providing preliminary guidance to national and local authorities, school administrators and staff and implementing partners on how to take short-term measures to support, transform or adapt school feeding programmes in their efforts to safeguard the food security and nutritional status of school-aged children, particularly the most vulnerable, during the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides specific recommendations according to the various target groups involved in school feeding and has an additional section providing guidance specifically around homegrown school feeding.
The note includes a segment on lessons learned from the Ebola outbreak in reallocating food from the school feeding programme to the overall emergency response by using school canteens to reach extremely vulnerable groups, such as children living in Ebola-affected households and Ebola-orphans living in hosting families, among other examples.
