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Sierra Leone

WFP Sierra Leone Country Brief, July 2022

Attachments

In Numbers

155 mt of food assistance distributed

USD 8.1 m six-month (July – December 2022) net funding requirements

220,231 people assisted in July 2022

Operational Updates

Root Causes

  • WFP in partnership with the Ministry of Health and Sanitation trained 99 lead mothers and 99 secretaries of mother support groups in Kambia, Moyamba and Pujehun districts in nutrition counselling and how to conduct cooking demonstrations. This is part of WFP’s social behavioural change communication (SBCC) programme, which promotes cooking that protects the nutrients in foods for improved infant and young child feeding. The programme overall aims to prevent chronic malnutrition at community level among children aged 6-23 months.

Mother support groups include mothers, fathers, and grandparents and are key actors in addressing the root causes of malnutrition in Sierra Leone, which include inadequate knowledge of nutrition. WFP and the Ministry empower the groups to conduct regular counselling sessions especially targeting pregnant and lactating women (PLW) and adolescent girls. Moyamba, Kambia and Pujehun have some of the highest levels of malnutrition in Sierra Leone.

Resilience Building

  • As part of efforts to scale-up home-grown school feeding (HGSF), WFP and Government representatives jointly assessed 60 school communities in Kambia, Pujehun, and Kenema districts in July. The teams mainly assessed the capacity of nearby farmer-based organizations (FBOs) to supply schools with vegetables on a regular basis. WFP will expand the programme to an additional 50 schools in support of the national school feeding policy, which emphasizes HGSF. WFP buys rice and distributes it to schools, whilst providing cash for the schools to buy vegetables from their FBOs. As such, WFP provides children with more nutritious meals and boosts farmers’ incomes.

  • WFP and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in collaboration with the National Disaster Management Agency on 29 July facilitated the training of 40 Government and non-governmental organization (NGO) emergency preparedness and response staff and 60 Red Cross volunteers. The training was in the use of the questionnaires as a Minimum Preparedness Action for strengthened operational readiness. The training will allow efficient data collection and analysis on affected populations to inform strategic response actions