BY SOLOMMON DIBABA
A couple of days back, the Deputy Mayor of the Addis Ababa City Administration, Adanetch Abebe inaugurated the third public wet feeding center commissioned to provide standard and nutritious meals for the needy and elderly here in Addis Ababa. The history of the operation of feeding centers in Addis Ababa dates back to the 1984-1985 period in which the city hosted and fed hundreds of thousand Ethiopians who migrated to the city due to the famine that plagued almost all areas of the northern , southern and eastern part of the country.
Emergency feeding centers that catered to the relief needs of citizens from rural and urban areas of Addis Ababa were established for instance in the compounds of Urael Orthodox Church, Yekatit 12 School and a number of other churches in the city under the supervision of the former Relief and Rehabilitation Commission and partner international NGOs. Similar therapeutic and regular feeding centers were also established in regional towns of Dessie and Mekele.
In early 2000, the advent of recurrent drought and food shortage in the regions forced the Ministry of Health to establish therapeutic feeding centers in towns like Sodo in the SNNPRS and at Gode Town in Somali Region and other towns in Southern Ethiopia. With the influx of huge number of refugees from Somalia due to the terrorist activities of Al-Shebab the Ethiopian government and partner NGOs established feeding centers in several primary schools established in makeshift tents in Dollo Odo area of the Somali Region.
Over the last four years, school feeding centers flourished in a number of elementary schools in Addis Ababa and regional towns to reduce the number of school dropouts in areas affected by El- Nino and La-Nina induced climate change incidents. Since 2014, the Ethiopian government prescribed to a number of policies and operational strategies on social protection and social welfare activities. For instance the National Social Protection Policy was issued in 2014. Earlier in 1994, the government issued National Education and Training Policy and Health Policy followed by National Food and Nutrition Policy, Education Sector Policy of HIV and AIDS and the 2015 Sekota Declaration.
However, it is very difficult to conclude that all these policies were properly implemented as there were no meaningful cooperation and coordination between the goal owners of these policies. Over the last two years, the Addis Ababa City Administration started massive school feeding program that targeted more than 300,000 school children in the city. The provision of meals right at school compounds and supplying school bags, stationaries and uniforms eased the burden of the families of more than 60,000 school children in the city.
However, the supply of meals for needy persons and the elderly in Addis Ababa is a relatively new project to be established in all the sub-cities in Addis Ababa. Now what is the contribution of these public and school feeding centers in helping to improve the overall status of health and nutrition services in the city? This program could have been more fruitful had it been commissioned much earlier in the years but the main significance of this program among others in my opinion is its contribution to the easing the adverse effects of the spread of COVID-19 virus among the poor and disadvantaged stratum of the population in the city.
One of the most fundamental measures to be taken by the city administration is to ensure the necessary connection and interdependence between public health, nutritional services, and income generation programs for youth and needy women, further promotion of urban agriculture as an input for food ingredients for the feeding centers and programs that focus on promotion of food security and self-sufficiency at the household level.
Why is such coordination important? The coordination between the various social service and social protection schemes will help to maximize the positive impacts that public level and school feeding programs at city level. On the other hand, these programs should also be linked with the inputs from micro and small scale enterprises so that beneficiaries who are able to work can get better income to improve their livelihood in a more sustainable manner.
Public feeding centers in particular could create and excellent opportunity for promoting public education on sanitation and hygiene sensitization. This however needs to be planned and tailored to the interest of the beneficiaries and their standard of living. These feeding centers will help to promote friendship, cordial relations and respect among the beneficiaries which could be replicated into their respective residential areas, thus promoting peace and unity among themselves.
Moreover, such programs should expect to face some challenges and difficulties related to continuous and uninterrupted supply of raw materials for food preparation, budget constraints and problems related to coordination off activities among the stakeholders. Some argue that school feeding would create an unnecessary completion between children in a family who go to school and get meals and others who stay at home for so many reasons. They note that it is better to building the capacity of families so that they can feed their own children.
It is better to consider that meals are served only when children are at school and at lunch time but at other times they still need to depend on their families for breakfast and supper. This implies that programs for ascertaining food security at household level need to cover larger number of families. Analysis from results on school feeding indicate that children who were enrolled in such programs had far better academic performance and stayed at school resulting in the reduction of school dropouts both in the urban and rural schools.
Public feeding centers for needy persons and the elderly must conduct their work by integrating health services and trainings for those who are able to work. Besides it is important to include psychosocial services in the program to help the older beneficiaries to get rid of old age traumatic experiences they face.
The normal operation of public feeding centers requires regular and rigorous follow up and periodic evaluation to ensure better performance and visible positive impacts. Although such projects are only at take off stage, it is important to effectively replicate them in semi-arid ecological parts of the country and areas where there is a marked level of food gap between the rainy season and harvest period.
These feeding centers need to consider the nutritional tastes and desires of the beneficiaries and ensure their participation in the daily services provided to them.
Civil society organizations and NGOs working on integrated rural and urban programs can join in to support government efforts in supporting the needy in urban and rural settings. This means that programs on feeding the needy and the elderly in urban and rural areas need to be effectively integrated with food security projects that are operated by all stakeholders in the country.
In this respect the implementation of the Sekota Declaration is very important to see a nationwide positive impact from nutrition programs in the country. Although the program was well prepared, irregularities of implementation and lack of budget among implementing agencies had become a major hurdle on the implementation of the objectives set in the declaration.
BY SOLOMMON DIBABA
The Ethiopian Herald May 20/2021
