HELP LIBERIA FOUNDATION

Feeding the Kids in HLF School

Posted by Help Liberia Foundation on July 01, 2007

There are many reasons why a lot of school-age kids are not in school in the developing world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Two of those reasons have to do with the high cost associated with education, which poor or low-income parents cannot afford, and the conspicuous absence of schools in most parts of individual countries, especially in the countryside.

In view of the first of the two reasons mentioned above, our foundation continues to encourage individuals to assist some of these kids to get their education by serving as sponsors and paying their school fees. Some have already started doing that through the foundation. We are grateful to them for this humanitarian gesture. Also, to help solve the problem of the conspicuous absence of schools in the countryside, one of our plans is to establish as many schools as possible for children of poor or low-income families in Liberia. We believe that this goal is achievable, so we’re working towards it.

While it’s true that the two conditions mentioned supra cause most children to be out of school, there is a third condition that also causes them not to be in school and, if they are already in school, it causes them not to learn well. And that condition is the schools’ inability to feed the children. The children are hungry. If they saying, “Empty bag cannot stand,” is true, then it follows that hunger affects not only the kids’ learning ability, but also the learning process, as well as student enrollment.

Kids having lunch at our school

Many researches have proven that school feeding program achieves four objectives: helps increase enrollment, helps guarantee or stabilize attendance, helps to improve the nutritional condition of the children and helps to improve the cognitive development or performance of the children.

There are clear examples in Liberian schools where attendance dropped when the children were not fed, but increased when the World Food Program (WFP) started giving food ration to the schools. Moreover, it was discovered that when schools catering to children from poor families were not feeding the kids, the kids were more likely to be sickly or unhealthy, as compared to children who were fed in similar schools.

Kids having lunch at our school

Indeed, while it is extremely important to get as many children as possible in school, hunger causes some of them to stop attending, to be sickly and to perform poorly. However, as examples in most developing countries have shown, one of the major ways to solve these problems is to help feed the children on a regular basis.

We, therefore, encourage everyone who is in the position to assist in any way possible to help us obtain food for the kids attending our school. Even if your help comes once, or once a while, it would still greatly help and be appreciated.