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Over 40 pct of Madagascar's primary school students food insecure

Xinhua, October 20, 2016 Adjust font size:

About 42 percent of students in primary schools in Madagascar are food insecure, officials in Madagascar's ministry of National Education said on Wednesday.

"About 42 percent of children in primary school are affected by food insecurity throughout the territory of Madagascar," Norovelo Rova Gabrielle, the head of school feeding projects under Madagascar's Ministry of National Education, told Xinhua in an interview.

"Amboasary, a town in the southeast of the country, is the most affected with a rate of 77 percent," Gabrielle said.

Latest data from Madagascar's ministry of National Education for the school year 2013-2014 showed a completion rate of 70 percent in Madagascar's Primary schools, and demonstrated the growing dropout also due to food insecurity.

To cope with this food insecurity in Madagascar's primary schools, a school feeding program was validated on Wednesday in Madagascar for the period 2017-2021, covering 225,000 children in three regions of the southern part of the country and more than 17,000 children in the most disadvantaged urban areas of Antananarivo (center ), Toliara (southwest) and Toamasina (east).

"This is to support the attention of elementary school students during class by providing a meal. Without this support, some will have trouble focusing on effective learning, " the Minister of National Education Paul Rabary said during the validation workshop.

The program is supported by technical and financial partners of Madagascar that work in school feeding such as the World Food Program (WFP) and local community organizations.

Data from Madagascar's ministry of National Education showed that Madagascar has nearly 4 million children in its public primary school and about nearly 900,000 in private primary schools. Endit