Brasília, November 22th - The virtual activity ‘Resilient and sustainable school feeding programmes training sessions will be offered in three sessions for eight Caribbean countries, starting on November 29th. The initiative is carried out jointly by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Brazil-FAO International Cooperation, and the Mexico-CARICOM-FAO Initiative. 

The sessions are divided into three parts and will have the participation of technicians and managers of school feeding programmes from the Bahamas, Belize, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago. The sessions aim to promote different approaches, tools, and lessons learnt from addressing food and nutrition education, public procurement, and legal frameworks of school feeding programmes.

The sessions will bring on average from 30 to 40 participants. It is also expected that some of the participants will be from regional institutions such as the CARICOM Secretariat, Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI), Caribbean Agro-Economic Society (CAAES), and The University of the West Indies. The first session will focus on food and nutrition education and will be held on November 29th. The second is about Linking School feeding with local small farmers , on December 6th, and the last will focus on |governance, and policy and legal frameworks for school feeding, held on February 28th, 2023. 

Among the participants there will be officials and managers from the national school feeding coordination units, nutritionists and dietitians involved in the coordination and implementation of the national school feeding program of the government, principals, teachers, and cooks involved in the school feeding, caterer/vendors and others,  smallholder producers and associations, FAO personnel and other stakeholders.

According to Gabriela Ayon-Chang, the facilitator of the course, the expectation is that a set of tools, guidelines, and good practices documented will be presented, discussed, and shared with the participants. “We will include school nutrition standards, food safety, nutrition guidelines, school gardens, menus, and food and nutrition education”, says. “The participants will be able to learn the steps-by-steps approach to follow and challenges to anticipate while implementing these actions on their realities”.

Organizers

The activity has been organized by FAO with the support of the Brazil-FAO technical cooperation through the project Consolidation of School Feeding Programmes in Latin America and the Caribbean, carried out by the Brazilian Cooperation Agency (ABC/MRE), the National Fund for Educational Development (FNDE/MEC) and FAO; and the Mexico-CARICOM-FAO Initiative Cooperation for Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Change in the Caribbean program funded by the Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation (AMEXCID) and implemented by FAO with the support of the National System for the Comprehensive Development of Families (SNDIF). 

The countries in the Caribbean started receiving the support of the Brazil-FAO international cooperation back in 2014, and the Mexico-CARICOM-FAO was initiated in 2018. Since then, both cooperations have provided technical assistance in school feeding programme implementation at a national level and have promoted dialogue and exchange of experiences, taking as a reference the sustainable school feeding approach modeled after the experience of the National School Feeding Programme (PNAE by its Portuguese acronym) of Brazil. 

The experience accumulated by PNAE has qualified it as a social, broad, universal policy for public education, based on legal frameworks, food and nutrition education actions, and the offer of a healthy, adequate and regional diet in educational centers (with at least 30% of the products purchased from family farming). 

Link: https://fao.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Yedy1NRnS8Oc4u3hHBUjgQ