AMMAN – The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) started today distributing locally produced date bars enriched with vitamins and minerals as part of Jordan’s national school feeding programme.
WFP is to provide support to the national school feeding project in Jordan for three years until May 2017 in a project worth US$17 million. The governments of the Russian Federation and Canada provided the funds that will benefit 320,000 school children – half of them girls.
“WFP puts a lot of effort into managing and implementing its school feeding programmes around the world,” said WFP Jordan Representative and Country Director Maha Ahmed. “School feeding is a crucial safety-net especially for the poorest households, where children sometimes miss breakfast and the school snack is the first bite to eat they get on any given day.”
The Ministry of Education will distribute WFP’s locally-produced date bars along with fresh fruit in schools in the most vulnerable and food insecure areas. It will also distribute high-energy biscuits produced in bakeries run by Jordan’s armed forces.
The three-year school feeding project aims to double the number of schoolchildren currently receiving a daily snack in public schools to 320,000 by May 2017. As part of its assistance to the government, WFP will help the Ministry of Education develop a sustainable national school feeding system, operating in line with international standards, as part of the country’s social safety net.
WFP is the world’s largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide. On average, WFP reaches more than 90 million people with food assistance in 80 countries each year.
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For more information please contact (email address: firstname.lastname@wfp.org): Abeer Etefa, WFP/Cairo, Tel. +202 2528 1730 ext. 2600 Mob. +2 010 666 34352 Faten Al-Hindi/Amman, mob. +962-796665255