"With skills and knowledge gained through PCD's workshop more can be learnt and incorporated into our annual plans, taking lessons learnt from other countries and applying these to our SHN programmes."
Improving Nutrition in Botswana's School Meals
Vanity Mafule, Assistant Director of the Food Relief Service at Botswana's Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development attended the SHN course in Kilifi, Kenya in 2012. Here she describes how the course aided her understanding on ensuring nutritious foods are used in Botswana school meals.
Botswana's school feeding programme caters for all primary school children, including those most vulnerable, reaching to 331,000 learners throughout the country.
The 2012 course placed a lot of emphasis on the review of school meals and menu planning and how obtaining nutritious products through local procurement would ensure food used in meals could contain all the necessary nutrients required.
Following my attendance on the 2012 course the school meal menu was reviewed in 2013 and a new proposal to improve micronutrient intake was incorporated. We had never experienced a great problem with child malnutrition but our menus lacked micronutrients so we wanted to try and close this gap.
Course Impact on Strengthening Home Grown School Feeding
The courses lessons in addition to other workshops organised by NEPAD and PCD that we attended have strengthened Botswana's Home Grown School Feeding programme and we hope that the HGSF intervention will be incorporated into Botswana's National School Health Policy. The courses have furthered our connections with both PCD and NEPAD which have played a vital role in advising on a few issues that need our immediate attention such as developing a feeding policy for the country and improving and transforming our current school feeding programme, the Letlhafula Programme into a fully fleshed HGSF one.
