Endale Terefe, a 14-year-old pupil in Addis Ababa who lives with his aunt after the death of his parents, used to arrive at school so hungry he struggled to stay awake. “My aunt has no money to buy food,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in July 2019. “So I was obliged to come to school with no lunch box and felt sleepy in class.” Three years earlier, he and other pupils began receiving two free meals a day from local charities. “I am now attending the class attentively,” he said.
Until 2019, feeding hungry children in the capital had been left largely to charities, while the federal government gave free food to rural schools during droughts. That changed in January 2019, when the Addis Ababa city administration launched its own school feeding programme. It set aside 169 million birr for free meals in all the city’s primary schools, covering more than 50,000 children. Charity programmes fed about 80,000 more.
“Education for all is a global motto and access to education is a matter of right, so the city government has a responsibility to feed students,” said Meti Tamrat, the programme’s coordinator at the Addis Ababa Education Bureau. She said not every needy pupil was covered yet and that it was too early to measure the results.
The link between rural drought and urban hunger is direct. Poor harvests cut the food reaching the cities and drive up prices, said Esubalew Abate, an assistant professor of food and nutrition security at Addis Ababa University. “Whenever there is drought, it is very clear that the food price increases,” he said. Belaynesh Ferede, a 45-year-old mother of two, said a kilogram of teff had risen from 20 to 30 birr in four years and potatoes had doubled from 10 to 20 birr. According to Habitat for Humanity, 80 percent of Addis Ababa’s residents live in slums.
The 2015–2016 El Niño drought, Ethiopia’s worst in 50 years, showed what hunger does to schooling: pupils fell asleep or felt sick in class, attendance dropped and many dropped out. A $50 million federal emergency programme then gave about 6 million rural pupils free meals over three years, and the World Food Programme said it stabilised attendance. “Even students who had dropped out a long time ago returned to school,” the agency reported. Research by the Ye Enat Weg Charitable Association, which has fed pupils since 2014, found that by 2018 dropout rates in the city’s schools had fallen by 75 percent and academic scores had risen by 14 percent since 2006.
The need remained large. The Ministry of Education’s 2019 emergency school meal plan said more than a million children in drought-hit areas were still going to school hungry, and the Famine Early Warning Systems Network warned that most households in five regions faced crisis-level food shortages through September 2019. Bereket Takele, an adviser on the programme at the ministry, said the government wanted to move from emergency feeding to a permanent programme in all primary schools. “The government has learned a huge lesson about how drought can affect students,” he said.
Sources: Malay Mail (Thomson Reuters Foundation), ReliefWeb (Thomson Reuters Foundation)