Bolivia Title II school feeding program

480 Title II school feeding program in Bolivia. The program is administered by Food for the Hungry, Caritas, and the Adventist Development and Relief Agency. The evaluation covered the period 1993-9/94. The feeding program reaches 1,973 of the 5,705 primary schools in the Departments of La Paz, Oruro, and Potosi. The program is carried out by the parents, who collect the food from the warehouses of the cooperating sponsor, transport it to the schools, store it, and cook and serve the breakfast and lunches. The evaluation found that school feeding fulfills its promise of significantly improving the diet of elementary school children. Students with school feeding consume nearly two-thirds of their daily requirements for calories and protein, while students without consume half of these requirements. Moreover, teachers feel that these students are better learners and are more alert and energetic. School feeding also cuts dropout rate; dropouts were 3% in schools with feeding and 10% in schools without. Parents do a reasonably good job in carrying out the program even though the quantity and quality of school feeding and its nutritional impact vary considerably from the one school to another. Parents choose whether or not they want school feeding for their children, making it more difficult to target the program to the poorest provinces and students. The school feeding program starts well after the beginning of the school year in most schools, but as many as 20% of the schools leave the program during the course of the school year because of the various costs of the program to the parents. Lessons learned are: (1) the school feeding program is parent driven and is more successful in those schools where the parents take an active role in organizing and constantly supervising the program; (2) in the highlands, school feeding does indeed improve the diets of the children, whereas in other country studies, no evidence of diet improvement was found; (3) more supervision and TA are needed to strengthen the parents" associations sponsoring the school feeding program to make it more stable throughout the school year.