{"id":281021,"date":"2019-07-08T02:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-08T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/?guid=51a830cccc22f4fb80c46b30360255f9"},"modified":"2026-10-07T11:25:52","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T15:25:52","slug":"addis-ababa-starts-feeding-its-schoolchildren-as-drought-pushes-up-food-prices-in-the-capi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/281021","title":{"rendered":"Addis Ababa starts feeding its schoolchildren as drought pushes up food prices in the capital"},"content":{"rendered":"

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. \u201cMy aunt has no money to buy food,\u201d he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in July 2019. \u201cSo I was obliged to come to school with no lunch box and felt sleepy in class.\u201d Three years earlier, he and other pupils began receiving two free meals a day from local charities. \u201cI am now attending the class attentively,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"Elementary
Elementary school pupils at a school in Ethiopia\u2019s Semien Mountains, March 2016 (Zelalemgizachew, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0) [file photo]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u2019s primary schools, covering more than 50,000 children. Charity programmes fed about 80,000 more.<\/p>\n

\u201cEducation 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,\u201d said Meti Tamrat, the programme\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cWhenever there is drought, it is very clear that the food price increases,\u201d 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\u2019s residents live in slums.<\/p>\n

The 2015\u20132016 El Ni\u00f1o drought, Ethiopia\u2019s 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. \u201cEven students who had dropped out a long time ago returned to school,\u201d 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\u2019s schools had fallen by 75 percent and academic scores had risen by 14 percent since 2006.<\/p>\n

The need remained large. The Ministry of Education\u2019s 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. \u201cThe government has learned a huge lesson about how drought can affect students,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Sources:<\/strong> Malay Mail (Thomson Reuters Foundation)<\/a>, ReliefWeb (Thomson Reuters Foundation)<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FEATURE-As drought stokes urban hunger, Ethiopia dishes up free school meals  ReutersADDIS ABABA, July 8 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Endale Terefe remembers a time when he used to go to school so hungry he had trouble staying awake …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":837392,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-281021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ethiopian-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/elementary-school-semien-mountains-2016.jpg?fit=1280%2C853&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NivD-1b6B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281021"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":837406,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281021\/revisions\/837406"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/837392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}