The Right to Food and School Feeding Programes in Addis Ababa: Experiences from Tsehai Chora and Dagmawi Minelik Kindergarten &Primary Schools
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Date
2014-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This thesis examines school feeding program in Addis Ababa and it explores whether it contributes to the promotion and realization of the right to food in Ethiopia. In doing so, the study explores the experiences of some selected schools’ feeding programs in Addis Ababa. The writer interviewed and conducted discussion with number of informants drawn from students, parents, teachers, school representatives or administrators, representatives of governmental and nongovernmental organizations.
The study shows that the programs helped to some extent in alleviating the lack of food they faced. The programs helped the student beneficiaries and allowed them to have to get food and enabled them to go to school. This shows the potential of the school feeding programmes to prevent the consequences of lack of food among the school children studied. The study also shows that school feeding programmes in Addis Ababa being carried out at the schools visited for the purpose of this study are initiated on humanitarian ground, although there are some principles that are incorporated in the programs which are in line with the right based approach. Consequently, the affected students are passive recipients of food being served at the respective schools based on voluntary contribution of individual members of the community with some support from non-government organizations.
The writer suggests that first of all, the potential of school feeding as the mechanism for promotion of the right to food and to be free from hunger among children and the affected population as a whole requires further research. Secondly there is a huge gap in terms of awareness and information about the on-going programs, and there is a need to create awareness in these programs. The writer also suggests laws and policy in regard to the right to food and school feeding programmes in Ethiopia are not adequate and this need to be revisited.
In conclusion school feedings program based on the rights-based approach have the potential to serve as springboard for the promotion and then the realization of the right to food. The right based approach would help incorporate and represent better the students affected and may help them influence what and how they are going to get what they should get. Moreover such an approach contributes to break the silence surrounding the suffering due to lack of food, children and the various categories of people in Addis Ababa and elsewhere around the country.
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Right to Food, School Feeding Programes, Addis Ababa