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Cambodia

WFP Cambodia Country Brief, April - June 2024

Attachments

Operational Updates

Nutrition

Strategy

  • WFP and UN Nutrition partners are supporting Cambodia’s Council for Agricultural and Rural Development to develop the country's Third National Strategy for Food Security and Nutrition 2024-2028. The strategy outlines how food, health, and social protection can help achieve nutrition goals and identifies multi-sectoral priorities, with WFP providing technical leadership as part of the UN Nutrition Network. This complements the revision of Cambodia's 2030 Sustainable Development Roadmap, with a climate focus.

Wasting

  • Following WHO’s 2023 revised guidelines on prevention and treatment of child wasting, WFP, in collaboration with UNICEF and Helen Keller International, initiated support to the Ministry of Health to develop revised guidelines, protocols and tools for the integrated management of acute malnutrition.

Rice Fortification

  • WFP is collaborating with the Ministry of Planning, which leads the country’s food fortification efforts, to develop a national strategy for food fortification, addressing micronutrient deficiencies. This strategy aims to enhance population nutrition by adding essential micronutrients to commonly consumed foods, covering aspects like food selection, fortification processes, quality control, and monitoring. As the SUN Business Network convener, WFP facilitates collaboration between public and private stakeholders to advance rice fortification efforts nationwide.

Social Protection

  • WFP supported the National Social Protection Council to use analytical tools, including the minimum expenditure basket, to calculate social protection transfer values for healthy diet access.

  • WFP is supporting UNICEF and the National Social Protection Council to conduct an impact evaluation of the family cash transfer programme. This will assess the programme's future impact on poverty, resilience, nutrition, and diets of vulnerable households - informing Cambodia's social protection system.

Shock-Responsive Social Protection

  • WFP continues to support the Government to operationalize the shock-responsive social protection framework through the development of a systems strengthening plan, a business process and scalability framework.

Nutrition-Sensitive School Feeding

  • WFP, FAO and the Ministry of Education, Youth are piloting context-specific nutrition standards for school meals. For over 3 months, 5,000 children from 20 schools received increased rations and access to fresh fruits, following enhanced nutrition standards. Evidence-based findings from the pilot evaluation will make dietary recommendations and inform advocacy efforts to improve the benefits of school meals on nutrition and health.

  • Recognizing the importance of local, fresh foods for schoolchildren, WFP collaborated with the Commercialization of Aquaculture for Sustainable Trade Cambodia project to provide fish from 16 suppliers to 77 schools in Kampong Thom. This initiative engaged local cooperatives, strengthening producer-supplier-school linkages to support traceability, food safety, stable prices, and economic benefits for farmers. The successful model will expand to other commodities and provinces, enhancing access to market for local producers and meals quality and diversity.

  • WFP is piloting the integration of fortified rice in the national school meals programme to ensure essential nutrient provision to schoolchildren. WFP is supporting millers to establish blending systems to mix fortified rice kernels with local rice. Trainings ensured quality and proper blending