Free meals help Indonesian schoolchildren stand tall

It was a simple lunch: fried noodles, a piece of fried chicken and a banana. But for Safira, 11, this meal is a luxury. Provided free by her school, it’s also the first and only meal she will have for the rest of the day. The daughter of a factory employee and a day labourer who travels hours each day to find work, there is little money to cook meals at home. Dinner is usually a banana or two. When the school does not provide lunch, Safira goes hungry. Her small primary school in the city of Serang, 60 km west of the Indonesian capital Jakarta, provides three out of six lunches every week.

The menu is a carefully considered mix of carbohydrates, proteins, fibre and vitamins. The ingredients are sourced from local farmers, and groups of mothers whose children study at the school take turns to prepare the meals.

The school meal programme, funded by UN World Food Programme (WFP) and global commodities trader Cargill Inc, is part of a larger effort by Indonesian authorities and aid agencies to tackle malnutrition.

In Indonesia, one in three children between the ages of six and 14 do not eat enough nutritious food, the WFP says.

“Economic losses due to stunting and malnutrition are estimated to be 2 to 3 per cent of Indonesia’s GDP,” said Martha Bowen, deputy country director in Indonesia for US’s government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), which runs a $134 million project to reduce stunting in Indonesia.

According to government data, 37 per cent of all Indonesian children under five were stunted in 2013. This translates to over 9.5 million stunted children.

Stunting is caused by long-term under-nutrition, combined with sanitation and hygiene problems. It hinders children’s cognitive growth and economic potential, experts say.

A WFP study comparing schools with the meal programme and those without revealed higher attendance rates at the former, said Anthea Webb, the agency’s director in Indonesia. “Kids were skipping school a lot less, anaemia rates went down,” she said.

The MCC, meanwhile, supports health centres where pregnant women and children receive vaccinations and nutrition supplements.

Tackling stunting takes a generation, longer than most governments last, so it requires widespread buy-in, says WFP.

— Thomson Reuters Foundation