Testimony on the Proposed World School Feeding Initiative

Before the

Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry

on behalf of

Catholic Relief Services

Presented by Mr. Kenneth Hackett

Executive Director

Catholic Relief Services

July 27, 2000

I. INTRODUCTION

Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to testify on behalf of Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the official overseas relief and development agency of the United States Catholic Bishops.

Founded in 1943, CRS is an American Private Voluntary Organization (PVO) that supports programs in over 83 countries and territories and employs nearly 4,000 staff worldwide. We provide food assistance and emergency relief. We support agriculture and community-based health programs, including health education, child survival, and care and counseling for persons living with HIV/AIDS. CRS is helping to promote sustainable development in the world's poorest countries. We are also becoming increasingly involved in peace-building programs in many different situations.

Our deep concern for the poor is rooted in Catholic Social Teaching and the Gospel's call to serve the least among us. We are on the ground helping to alleviate the plight of refugees from Kosovo and Serbia to Sierra Leone and East Timor. We are helping in the reconstruction after natural disasters such as Hurricane Mitch in Central America. We are engaged in the difficult and complex work of rebuilding peoples' lives and communities after conflicts in Rwanda, Bosnia and Liberia.

Our programs are built upon our long-term presence in the countries where we work and the substantive partnerships we have developed with churches, faith-based and other secular organizations, and local governments. In addition to working with our partners overseas, we also count on the collaboration of a strong network of partners in the U.S., the foundation of which is the U.S. Catholic Church structure.

II. WORLD SCHOOL FEEDING INITIATIVE

Catholic Relief Services supports a greater international commitment to address the needs of poor children through food assistance. We are particularly grateful for the efforts of His Excellency George McGovern and The Honorable Robert Dole; their support of a world school feeding initiative has dramatically raised the profile of this important topic, and provided us an opportunity to weigh in from a perspective steeped in 57 years of working in every corner of the world.

CRS is ready and willing to participate as a partner with the United States government to make this initiative work. In order to do so, it is imperative that certain procedures be in place to facilitate approval and implementation of high quality food-assisted education programs targeting the most needy children. In particular, it will be necessary to have in place a global agreement between the administrative agencies of the U.S. government and CRS to identify, develop and carry out effective programming of food and other related resources around the world.

PVO involvement in this initiative is important for two reasons. First, we have extensive experience implementing effective school feeding and education programs in developing countries, blending food with other interventions to improve the quality of education for poor children. A great deal of PVO effectiveness can be attributed to our capacity to go beyond the confines of a local government overview and become engaged in the program at every level. PVO presence on the ground and our partnerships with local churches and faith-based and secular organizations help to ensure accountability, proper targeting to the poor, ongoing monitoring and evaluation of impact, and sustainability.

Second, we believe and understand U.S. official humanitarian foreign aid assistance to be essentially an expression of American solidarity with the poor overseas. American PVOs, as organizations that provide that link, should therefore be a part of any equation that channels U.S. food aid to the developing world. This testimony intends to elaborate on these two principal issues.

III. CRS EXPERIENCE

The thinking among development professionals on school feeding's relation to improved education has, over the years, changed and matured in response to new findings and research. CRS has kept pace with this change, developing new, innovative methodologies and practices in the field. As the proposal for a world school feeding initiative garners increasingly more attention, we want to be sure that our experience and lessons learned contribute to the future of school feeding and, more broadly, education.

CRS History of School Feeding and Education

For many years, CRS has administered PL 480 Title II food assistance through local counterparts at institutional feeding centers such as primary schools, day care centers, and training and technical institutes for orphans. Typically, food is prepared and served to the recipients at these institutions as a late morning snack or midday lunch. Food has also been distributed as a dry ration to Food for Work recipients who assisted in school infrastructure improvements, to school workers who prepared the cooked rations, to teachers as a supplement to their salaries when participating in off-site training, and to casual workers engaged in the storage and handling of commodities.

CRS began specifically implementing school feeding programs around the world in the early 1950s with USAID/Food for Peace resources. The food served as an incentive for parents to send their children to school, and for teachers, school workers and community members to oversee the management of the institutional activities. The justification for school feeding was, therefore, not that it improved education in any way, but rather that it improved children's short term food security. Put more simply, daily meals at school offered a buffer against chronic food shortages.

For years, CRS' involvement in schools was limited to ensuring that our school feeding programs served our intended beneficiaries. Our performance as a USAID Cooperating Sponsor was assessed largely in terms of output: how much food was successfully delivered to how many children in a particular timeframe. In the early 1990s, however, a restructured USAID with limited staff capacity and an increasingly short-term, results-oriented climate led Food for Peace to question the food security impact of school feeding programs. As a result, the amount of food available for such programs dropped dramatically over the last ten years.

While we had, over the years, developed a well-functioning food tracking system and were able to demonstrate a strong record of delivering food to students, we had little to demonstrate that our food delivery translated into improved food security or educational outcomes. While the food was attracting children to school and addressing the problem of short-term hunger, no one was addressing what was happening in the classroom once these students arrived.

This proved to be a definitive moment for CRS' education programming. Rather than acquiesce to a USAID directive to phase-out of school feeding altogether, CRS in 1995 reflected upon our programs from an education perspective and decided to revamp our school feeding activities. We made a fundamental shift in our programming model: instead of seeing school-based food assistance as the centerpiece of the agency's education programming, we made education the focus of the programming and viewed food assistance as one of several possible interventions. School feeding was thus transformed into Food-Assisted Education (FAE).

Food-Assisted Education: A New Model

Food-assisted education is defined as a set of "interventions supporting long-term education objectives, which are being implemented with food (among other) resources and thus aim to have short-term food security impact in addition to long-term food security impact." Adoption of this model has inspired a new generation of progressive education initiatives within the agency.

CRS now complements school feeding with a number of other critical interventions: distribution of micronutrient supplements to improve students' health; provision of hygiene and nutrition education for parents; improvements to school infrastructure; training of teachers and directors in improved pedagogy and school management techniques; take-home rations to encourage enrollment and attendance of girls and other marginalized groups; information and education campaigns to raise awareness of the importance of issues such as girls' education; and strengthening of Parent Teacher Associations and Village Education Committees to increase community involvement in education. This combination of multiple interventions provides a more holistic approach to child development and a more comprehensive support for primary education. The role of these interventions in improving the quality of education and building the capacity of communities to sustain these activities cannot be underestimated.

CRS as an agency now recognizes that while food can be an important resource, it alone is not sufficient to improve educational achievement. Without long-term, integrated and comprehensive strategies to complement food with interventions to increase sustainability, we are simply creating dependency and using resources inefficiently. To use food in a vacuum is to fail to maximize the impact of valuable commodities which, if coupled with the programming mentioned above, can have a lasting impact on the development of people and communities. Similarly, to undertake food-assisted education for only a short time would entail significant up-front costs to set up systems, standards and relationships, which would neither be fully utilized nor fully developed in only two to three years' time.

These additional interventions, of course, need to be funded. In order to be truly effective in improving the quality of education, a school feeding initiative needs dollar cash resources and/or monetization proceeds to fund the appropriate complementary activities which should accompany food. This is a critical issue. New Food for Peace guidelines now restrict the use of monetization proceeds for education programs. A school feeding initiative that does not monetize must find cash resources elsewhere -- or run the risk of providing food in a vacuum and the certain failure that would mean for achieving educational goals.

CRS: A Leader in Food-Assisted Education

CRS is recognized as a leader in food-assisted education, both in terms of quality and size. Within the U.S. food aid community, there is widespread recognition -- and replication -- of our programming model. CRS implements more food-assisted education programs than any other PVO. Our current portfolio includes over 1,000,000 direct beneficiaries in eleven countries in three contexts: areas in crisis, areas in transition from crisis to stability and areas considered relatively stable.

In addition, CRS operates education programs in 18 other countries which do not utilize food as a resource because it is not appropriate in the particular contexts. These programs do, however, offer valuable models in terms of education for peace-building, parental involvement, teacher training, early childhood development and inclusive education. We are able to draw upon the lessons learned in these non-food programs and adapt various techniques to the contexts and countries where we are using food in order to improve education.

Our staff are professionals who bring strong technical skills and expertise in the field of education and the related areas of community participation, school health and teacher training. In the field, we work directly with local communities, applying participatory techniques that engage communities in the design and management of programs to increase sustainability. We also collaborate with local organizations, international organizations, host governments and other donors to coordinate the work towards quality education, recognizing that no one institution can effectively cover all aspects of such a program.

Results and Impact

CRS food-assisted education programs work. We have responded to a call to demonstrate improvements in education as a result of our programming, and have done so admirably. We have developed sophisticated monitoring and evaluation tools and systems to measure the impact of our programs and hold ourselves to rigorous standards of accountability. A school feeding initiative that channeled food -- along with cash resources -- to CRS could be assured of results in improving access to and the quality of education.

In Ghana, our focus on girls' education has been demonstrably successful. Through the use of take-home rations to boost girls' enrollment and attendance, and information campaigns to raise awareness of the importance of educating girls we have seen significant results. Girls' enrollment in schools receiving take-home rations was 88% higher than in control schools. Girls' attendance in schools receiving take-home rations was 50% higher than in control schools. Also in Ghana, a total of 68 school improvement projects carried out together with Parent Teacher Associations have significantly improved both the school learning environment as well as parental support for education.

In Burkina Faso, where take-home rations for girls are also used, our program reports a 27% increase in girls' enrollment between 1998 and 1999, compared to a 5% increase for boys in these schools for the same period. Also, in the last three years, CRS combined Food for Work rations with financial resources from other donors to build and repair classrooms in over 600 schools.

In Haiti, where teacher training, community participation and school health activities complement school feeding, primary school pass rates in CRS program schools have been significantly higher than the national average for the past two years. Attendance rates in Haitian primary schools supported by CRS have remained steady and impressive at 90%. Also, intensive community mobilization and training efforts have resulted in a dramatic rise in the numbers of PTAs that now initiate and implement school infrastructure improvements on their own, without the aid of CRS.

In India, Village Education Committees, mobilized and strengthened by CRS, are now successfully collecting fees from the community to support teachers and sustain schools. School clusters, initiated by CRS, have provided teachers with a forum to meet regularly to share techniques and contribute to one another's professional development. Early childhood development centers, supported by CRS, have allowed younger children to attend school and receive critical nurturing and development and have allowed mothers more free time for income-generating activities.

These four country programs are highlighted because they represent the largest and oldest education programs within the CRS portfolio. Again, one point must be underscored: we would not see these results with programs focused on school feeding alone. Girls' enrollment and attendance rates would not rise dramatically without the use of take-home rations and information campaigns to raise awareness; student pass rates would not improve without an emphasis on improving the learning environment and training teachers; parents and communities would not be mobilized and have the capacity to address school-related infrastructure problems without training and capacity-building. All of these interventions, woven together, are integral to improving access to and the quality of education, which in turn, is essential to improving human capacity and alleviating poverty in developing countries where we work.

School feeding has played a role in increasing access to education. CRS therefore supports a school feeding initiative as a step in the right direction. Such a program must, however, be comprehensive in nature, combining food with other interventions, if it is to have an impact on improving the quality of education.

World Education for All Conference

The timeliness of the world school feeding proposal could not be better, coming as it does on the heels of the World Education for All Conference in Dakar. A wonderful opportunity now exists for this initiative to be implemented alongside and in coordination with the broader education goals outlined during the conference so as to maximize the impact of all of these efforts.

The conference reaffirmed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child that "every child, youth and adult has the right to benefit from an education that will meet their basic learning needs in the best and fullest sense of the term, an education that includes learning to know, to do, to live together, and to be. It is an education geared to tapping each person's talents and potential, and developing learners' personalities, so that they can improve their lives and transform their societies."

Among the goals the conference committed itself to attaining are the following:

Ø Expanding and improving comprehensive early childhood care and education, especially for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children.

Ø Ensuring that by 2015, all children, with special emphasis on girls and children in difficult circumstances, have access to and complete free and compulsory primary education of good quality.

Ø Eliminating gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005, and achieving gender equality in education by 2015, with a focus on ensuring girls' full and equal access to and achievement in basic education of good quality.

Ø Improving all aspects of the quality of education and ensuring excellence of all, so that recognized and measurable learning outcomes are achieved by all, especially in literacy, numeracy and essential life skills.

CRS, as an agency with a track record in the very areas mentioned above, can play an important role in contributing to the goals set forth in Dakar, but we need the resources to do so. A food-assisted education program with accompanying cash resources, targeted to low-income developing countries and managed by PVOs, has the potential to link food with the other necessary interventions to make these goals a reality. Just as the school lunch program launched over two decades ago in the U.S. realized remarkable success in improving education for disadvantaged children, so too could this initiative achieve far-reaching results if linked with the broader goals of other actors and implemented through capable partners such as CRS.

IV. U.S. FOREIGN AID: AN EXPRESSION OF AMERICAN SOLIDARITY

Over the years, American Private Voluntary Organizations have been effective in responding to emergency and development needs of the poor throughout the world largely due to the generosity of American citizens through both private and public donations. Maintaining this constituency for foreign aid is crucial, not only for CRS but for all actors with a stake in the future of foreign aid. A key ingredient to maintaining an American constituency for foreign aid is to educate the American public about the positive results of foreign assistance and the importance of humanitarian development assistance. CRS has recognized this and has devoted a significant portion of our domestic agenda to raising awareness and understanding among Americans as to their responsibility to the poor overseas. It is important, too, that we recall the context within which PL 480 Title II was created. Its essence is that of a people-to-people expression of American goodwill. And, it is hard to imagine a more direct expression of that goodwill than through the work of American PVOs.

This is not to suggest food aid be given exclusively to PVOs; indeed, there is a role for both PVOs and United Nations agencies in receiving such assistance. PVOs have built strong, effective partnerships with agencies such as the World Food Program, UNICEF and UNHCR. These agencies have typically relied upon the distribution mechanisms many PVOs have developed in the field through partnerships with local churches, local non-governmental organizations and host governments. It is these partnerships at the local level that have contributed to PVOs' effectiveness in ensuring that food is delivered to its intended beneficiaries and used appropriately to achieve educational goals.

It must be pointed out, though, that the increasingly burdensome regulations and costs of operating U.S. food distribution programs over the years have limited the number of PVOs involved in such assistance. There are fewer than a half dozen American PVOs significantly engaged in managing food distribution programs. Without the full participation of PVOs in this initiative, it is difficult to envision widespread support for such programs among the U.S. constituency.

V. CONCLUSION

The world school feeding initiative and the subsequent momentum it has generated in Congress and the Administration are promising signs of a genuine concern for the poor and a sense of responsibility to those in need. We at CRS would like to harness the goodwill and energy evident in this initiative to make important strides in improving the quality of education for children in the developing world.

CRS and other PVOs have the capacity and the technical expertise to transform this initiative into far more than a school feeding program. In Catholic Social Teaching, the dignity of the human person is paramount. Programs that create dependency with little emphasis on nurturing communities' capacities to take control of their own lives run counter to the promotion of human dignity. Our years of education programming experience can add a value which, when complemented with food aid, will have a lasting impact on educational outcomes, human development and, ultimately, human dignity.

We at CRS are grateful for the positive comments often heard in Congressional debate about the role of faith-based organizations in directly meeting the needs of the poor. I can assure you the legislation you are considering will have a significant impact on our ability to provide children in the developing world with access to quality education. And it is through this education that we will change peoples' lives.