SPECIAL: HOW TO SAVE KIDS FROM HUNGER
San Remigio teams up with Gawad Kalinga, Capitol, national agencies to feed children
In San Remigio, Cebu, a thirdclass town of fewer than 60,000 people, Mayor Mariano Martinez’s discovery of some 1,800 children not going to school despite the presence of a government program giving incentives for school attendance, led to the start of a feeding program now held up as a model for other Cebu local governments to copy.
“We did a Community-Based Monitoring System test in San Remigio. And I found out that close to 900 kids aged 6-12 years old were not going to school, and another similar number for kids 13-18. I already had a Pantawid program, with their subsidy, so I was struck why there were still so many not going to school,” he said during the 2nd EndHunger Summit at the Cebu Provincial Capitol last April.
An anti-poverty program of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program gives monthly cash grants to families that avail themselves of maternal and child health services, and ensure their children’s school attendance.
Someone suggested that they might be persons with disabilities (PWD). But Martinez was not convinced, saying if they were PWDs, they might number 100, but not close to 900.
After attending the 1st EndHunger Summit in April 2017, it dawned on him that the children might not be going to school because they were hungry.
Pilot
This realization led to the town volunteering to become the pilot area in Cebu for a feeding program that began last November with the Cebu Provincial Capitol, the Department of Education (DepEd), the DSWD and Gawad Kalinga (GK) as partners.
Gawad Kalinga Community Development Foundation Inc. is a national movement that aims to end poverty for five million families.
Under the “Kusina sa Kahimsug ug Pag-amuma” (KKP), a localized adaptation of Gawad Kalinga’s “Kusina ng Kalinga” program to end hunger, 5,256 children in the town received lunch meals for 120 days in school year 2017-2018 prepared by two centralized kitchens established in the town.
The Province took care of the equipment and the renovation of the kitchens in San Remigio. GK provided the manager and trained the town’s people.
San Remigio provided the staff in the kitchens and the volunteers to help pack the lunch boxes, while the DSWD and the Deped funded the feeding through their existing feeding programs for all children in day care centers and supervised neighborhood play (SNP) in the case of the DSWD, and wasted and severely wasted children in the case of the DepEd.
Wasted children have weight too low for their height.
27 barangays
Under KKP, the feeding was universal for the children in day care, SNP, as well as from kindergarten to Grade 1 in the town’s eight SNPs, 29 day care centers (DCC) and 27 elementary schools across 27 barangays, while for Grades 2 to 6, only the wasted and severely wasted joined the feeding.
The kitchen at the San Remigio Central School in Barangay Poblacion took care of 2,640 children in 11 schools and DCCs and SNPs in the area, while the Tambongon Integrated School in Barangay Tambongon cooked for 2,616 children in 16 schools and the DCCs and SNPs in the area.
The lunch meals were prepared and packed daily with the help of local volunteers and parents using a rotation of 20 healthy recipes prepared by GK-Ateneo.
This is because Kusina ng Kalinga started as a feeding program of Gawad Kalinga-Ateneo, an office opened by Ateneo de Manila University to help for GK concerns.
Then called the Ateneo BluePlate for Better Learning, Ateneo’s program involved feeding children in public elementary schools in Quezon City in 2010. This later evolved and was renamed Kusina ng Kalinga after Gawad Kalinga adopted the program in 2014 to address hunger in Leyte and other areas hit by supertyphoon Yolanda, later expanding to Maguindanao and Marawi.
Challenges
The task hasn’t been easy, Mayor Martinez admitted.
“Nine or one-third of our baran-
gays are GIDA (Geographically Isolated and Disadvantaged Areas) barangays, which are hard to reach,” presenting a logistical nightmare of transporting the lunch boxes and returning them daily to the kitchens washed and ready for the next lunch preparation.
“Even until now, we have a problem with our (lunch) containers. Sometimes, they travel 30 kilometers. They have to be brought back clean on the same day for repacking the next day,” he said.
Martinez said the sheer number of children to feed also presented a challenge.
“If you have to feed 5,000plus children, you can’t just get kamunggay (moringa) from your neighbor’s house,” he said.
After initial problems with the children not liking the kamunggay that tended to smell old after traveling a long way from the town’s supplier in the city, the schools superintendent decided to have the vegetables planted by the town’s own farmers instead, for sale to the supplier.
“Now, it’s already fresh,” the mayor said.
For the four people needed to staff each kitchen, Martinez initially worried that no one would take the job since it would require them to start work at 3 a.m. daily.
So he got some job-order employees from landscaping and brought them to the kitchen. Included in the meals, no one wants to leave the job now, he said.
The town signed a new memorandum of agreement (MOA) to continue the program this year.
More towns
Three more towns have expressed interest in the KKP program. Samboan has signed a MOA with the program’s partners, while Catmon and Madridejos signed a Commitment of Support for the 120-day feeding program.
The target numbers of beneficiaries in these towns are 1,396 for Samboan, 2,179 for Catmon and 3,411 for Madridejos.
Gawad Kalinga-Cebu provincial head Antonio “Toby” Florendo Jr. said GK is inviting more municipalities to join the program, which aims to end hunger among Filipino children.
GK has already set up at least 16 kitchens nationwide since 2014, benefiting 21,401 children.
Funding gap
Under the KKP, there is a funding gap that will need to be filled by donors.
“P1.5 million to P1.6 million is the gap for this year to enable us to feed the more than 13,000 children in the four municipalities,” said Florendo.
He explained that the DepEd’s budget covers only wasted and severely wasted school children, but GK’s program feeds all the children in kindergarten and Grade 1, creating the gap.
“We focus on the younger kids because the younger you start getting them nourished properly, the better chance for them to be better nourished later on, even though there may be less food later. If their foundation is strong, the development of the brain and the bones is better,” he said.
Cebu Provincial Administrator Mark Tolentino said: “The incidence of malnutrition would be lower if we could already make sure that they get the proper nutrition at these ages. That’s the rationale why our feeding in day care, kindergarten to Grade 1 is universal.”
Seeking help
GK also welcomes donation of kitchen items like steamers, as well as the sending of volunteers to help cook in the kitchen, Florendo said.
“GK cannot do it on its own,” he said. “We’re restricted by budgetary constraints. If local volunteers are lacking, there will really be a struggle.”
He said that in Cebu, for the 1,480 or so GK families, there was only one management team of six people working on a purely voluntary basis.
“There’s only one paid person, the secretary,” he said.
Gawad Kalinga first made a name for itself mobilizing volunteers and sponsors to build homes for the poor in its goal to create empowered communities called GK villages throughout the country.
Getting buy-in
For the KKP, the initial legwork is done by the Province and GK.
“Basically, our role is to bring the local government units (LGUs) together, explaining to them this whole template, doing a centralized kitchen with them,” said Tolentino. “We go to the mayors because they have sway over the barangays, the teachers, the constituents. We need to get the community helping each other out in the preparation and deliveries.”
Florendo said the mayor would be the one to shuffle people around to create the positions and the manpower for the system, and to move the budgets around to fit in the system.
Despite the obvious benefits of the program, Tolentino said it was difficult to get the buy-in of the LGUs. And it is because of the work the program entails.
Florendo said it is the LGUs that will undertake the bidding for and procurement of the food. The budget is downloaded to the mayor from the DSWD and the DepEd.
This would be a departure from the process under the DepEd’s regular feeding program where it is the teachers who buy the ingredients, cook and do the liquidation because the DepEd is not among the agencies whose functions were devolved to the LGUs under the Local Government Code of 1991.
End hunger
Fr. Bienvenido Nebres, S.J., former president of the Ateneo de Manila University and Gawad Kalinga Board Member since 2012, underscored the importance of acting now to help the children.
“Ninety percent of our children study in public schools. Twenty percent of children drop out by Grade 2, 40 percent by Grade 6,” he said at the summit. “The reason the children don’t go to school, why their performance is not good is that they’re hungry.”
Nebres said that while the national government had allocated more than P8 billion this year for the national feeding program, this was not enough.
Some P5.3 billion has been allotted for the DepEd’s school feeding program, which targets the severely wasted and wasted children from kindergarten to Grade 6, while another P3.4 billion is for the DSWD’s supplemental feeding program, which provides universal feeding for children 2-4 years old in day care centers and SNP.
Disconnect
Nebres said the big challenge in the country is the “disconnect” between the 10 percent of Filipinos in the ABC income class, and the 60 percent in the D class, and 30 percent in the E class.
He said the income gap had “gotten worse, with the E class moving from 20 to 30 percent, and the ABC reduced from 20 to 10 percent.”
Since 2000, job growth has not been commensurate to the growth in the Philippine economy, Labor Assistant Secretary Alex Avila said at a gathering on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals in October.
In 2010, for instance, the economy grew 7.6 percent, but employment grew only 2.8 percent. In 2015, economic growth was 5.9 percent, but job growth was just 0.5 percent.
Real wages also grew only three percent in both years, showing “non-inclusive growth,” he said.
Last year, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations said 13.8 percent of the total Philippine population was undernourished.
Is it any wonder then that it said 7.9 percent of children under five years old in the country were also wasted?
Nebres lamented that the problem is so big, and yet the children are “invisible.”
“We don’t see them or choose not to see them. We have to address this problem not just of malnutrition but hunger,” he said.
KKP Ambassador Jobel Davide called on the private sector to support the program.
Quoting freedom icon Nelson Mandela, she said: “Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice.”