Three years after the end of a brutal, 27-year civil war, 150 000 Angolan schoolchildren are being fed by the World Food Programme (WFP), which plans to double that figure by 2006.
The United Nations food agency and the Angolan government this week launched one of many feeding programmes in the village of Sachifunga in the eastern Moxico province, where flamboyant rebel leader Jonas Savimbi was shot dead in February 2002, signalling an end to the war.
Sachifunga is an impoverished farming village of about 400 people and the only brick building is the school attended by 202 children.
”The WFP, in partnership with the Angolan government, started a feeding programme for schoolchildren in 1998 in Malange,” a province in the north, said Richard Corsino, the WFP head in Angola.
He said 30 000 children in the region benefited from the programme.
In 2003, a year after the end of the civil conflict, ”we resumed the programme in a new form, extending it to the provinces of Benguela, Huambo, Bie, Kuando Kubango and now Moxico”.
Corsiono said 150 000 students are being fed currently by the WFP, with plans to increase the number to 300 000 by next year.
”The government has pledged to pump in $8-million to support the feeding programme,” said Alexandra de Vitoria Simeao, Angola’s Deputy Minister for Education.
The meals are normally composed of cornmeal and soybean and cooked with oil and sugar.
It is a means of attracting pupils to schools in a country where the vast majority of its 15-million people live in poverty and where the benefits of its vast oil resources have yet to trickle down to the poor population.
Earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Angola has the potential for recovery after nearly three decades of ruinous civil war but faces the daunting task to establish economic growth and clean government.
In an annual report on Angola, the IMF warned the government against relying too much on oil revenues, which now account for half of the country’s economy.
Angola is fast becoming a world oil player as sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest producer after Nigeria, with output expected to hit two million barrels per day by the end of 2007. — Sapa-AFP