On Wednesday, June 12th, the World Food Programme (WFP) Centre of Excellence against Hunger in Brazil organized a webinar involving the WFP Regional Bureau for Southern Africa, and several WFP Country Offices in the region. The event aimed to share practical knowledge among the countries and discuss the challenges of South-South Cooperation. With a primary focus on school feeding programs, the webinar aimed to inspire collaboration with the Regional Bureau and Country Offices in Southern Africa, highlighting the role of the Centre as a platform to further promote school feeding programs locally, as well as exploring possible new partnerships to promote collaboration between countries.
Daniel Balaban, Director of the WFP Centre of Excellence against Hunger Brazil, presented the Centre’s role in relation to the Regional Bureau and other Southern African countries. “Our main objective is to create national solutions for school feeding programs, but they need to be linked to a series of activities that must be implemented for these programs to be sustainable, such as supporting small farmer organizations, supporting the creation of national public policies for school feeding, and the establishment of institutions to organize these policies in the country,” Daniel said. Kaori Ura, Senior Programme Advisor at the WFP Regional Bureau for Southern Africa, emphasized how collaboration with the Centre is important not only to spark new ideas in Country Offices but also as a tool to generate interest from local governments.
Representatives from countries with projects in partnership with the Centre of Excellence also discussed how Brazil’s experience is adapted to their respective realities. Narcia Walle, Senior Programme Associate in Mozambique, mentioned: “Regarding the most impactful initiatives in Mozambique, from the school feeding perspective, South-South exchanges were a fundamental tool to mobilize leadership for the adoption of national school feeding programmes. At the institutional and local levels, we are working closely with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Agriculture in collaboration with the Government of Brazil.”
Nadia Goodman, project coordinator of the IBSA Fund project in the Republic of Congo, added: “This is a very important initiative where the Congo government is receiving support from the Brazilian government in improving its situational capacity, developing small agricultural properties, linking them to the school feeding programme. This is a pilot we started launching last year and is funded by IBSA, which is the India, Brazil, and South Africa Forum, being a very important project for WFP.”
The Centre of Excellence and Southern African countries
Since 2011, the Centre of Excellence in Brazil has been working with the Regional Bureau for Southern Africa and Country Offices in the region to promote school feeding, nutrition, and food security to achieve Zero Hunger. In the region, the technical assistance provided by the Centre of Excellence has contributed to the development of school feeding policies that integrate local agriculture, improvement of institutional mechanisms, coordination of school feeding programs, as well as the review of school feeding monitoring and evaluation mechanisms.