Schools provide a supportive environment for promoting healthy eating habits from an early age that last a lifetime, while also opening the door to viable market opportunities for local family farmers, thereby helping to improve domestic production and consumption of local foods.
In Belize, Mesoamerica Hunger Free has focused on supporting the establishment of a national school feeding program based on the Sustainable Schools model. The implementation of the model goes beyond providing healthy and nutritious meals to children living in vulnerable conditions and poverty, as it places special emphasis on analyzing students’ nutritional status, engaging the educational community, establishing educational school gardens, and purchasing products directly from family farmers. It also includes adapting infrastructure for the receipt, storage, preparation, and consumption of food.
The program contributed to the implementation of a pilot project to validate the model in four elementary schools in the communities of Pueblo Viejo, Santa Elena, Santa Cruz, and San Antonio, in the district of Toledo. Based on this experience, Mesoamerica Hunger Free has provided technical assistance in the development of policy instruments and the creation of management and coordination mechanisms to promote the model’s implementation on a national scale.
These are some of the results achieved with the program’s support
- Improvements to the infrastructure for receiving, storing, preparing, and serving food in the schools participating in the pilot project in Toledo.
- Establishment of school gardens.
- Installation of a water filtration system in a school in Orange Walk district as a pilot project to help ensure access to safe drinking water.
- Strengthening biosecurity measures in preparation for the return to in-person classes at 20 schools amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Development of a nutritional plan based on an analysis of schoolchildren’s nutritional status and a mapping of local food production.
- Capacity building for teaching staff, administrative staff, kitchen staff, family farmers, students, and their families on topics such as the use of school gardens, the promotion of healthy lifestyles, direct purchases from local producers, the management of financial resources for school meals, the incorporation of food and nutrition education into the school curriculum, hygiene habits, and practices to ensure food safety.
- Design and validation of a mechanism for the direct procurement of products from local family farmers.
- Development of a national menu for the school feeding program for elementary schools and another for secondary schools.
- Systematization of the pilot implementation of the Sustainable Schools model in the Toledo district to expand it to other areas of the country.
- Development of a guide for public procurement from family farmers for school meals.
- Establishment of a National Technical Committee on Sustainable School Feeding with a view to institutionalizing the Sustainable Schools model for school feeding.
- Establishment of the Parliamentary Alliance Against Hunger and Malnutrition in Belize.
- Formulation and approval of the National School Food and Nutrition Policy.