Story by Rachel Shonhiwa
DEVELOPMENT partners continue to complement government efforts to guarantee food and nutritional security, beginning at the household level, with special attention on children.
World Vision in collaboration with the government, has launched an initiative dubbed the “ENOUGH Campaign”, a nationwide programme aimed at ensuring no child in Zimbabwe goes to bed hungry.
The campaign, launched in Harare this Friday, seeks to complement the government’s existing school feeding programme.
“The ‘Enough’ campaign is a global initiative for World Vision in all our hundred plus countries to scale up the need for children to have enough food and reduce malnutrition,” World Vision Zimbabwe national director, Mr Assan Golowa said.
“In Zimbabwe, the government is doing so much around the same, and development partners are also doing so much around the same issue. We are happy that the government is here with us because they are the owners of the initiative, and, organisations like us want to support the initiative.
“There are programmes that the government is spearheading already like the school feeding programmes and we are calling on all other organisations to team up. This is a call to action.”
The government lauded the initiative saying it speaks to national aspirations towards food and nutritional security.
“This campaign is important in that it speaks to the government’s aspirations within the government framework and policies,” the director general for the Food and Nutrition Council Dr George Kembo said.
“They have put in aspirations of the need to eliminate all forms of malnutrition. So this is our desire to say that nutrition can affect your cognitive ability, and your future productivity, and it directly affects the economy. It is an expensive thing to address so we are saying let us do it early.”
The government introduced the mandatory school feeding programme, targeting a four-star diet that includes proteins, vitamins, minerals, and starch in each meal, to improve the nutrition and welfare of children.
