Helping fight malnutrition in rural schools

For young school children in economically prosperous cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, enjoying a delicious lunch together with their classmates is a common event.

However, for millions of primary school students in China's western and remote mountainous areas, this remains a dream yet to be realized.

A recent study from the Beijing-based China Development Research Foundation reports that most of the 30 million boarding students in the central and western part of China remain in poor health due to the poor quality of food at their schools, leading to rampant malnutrition.

"Such phenomenon, an intruding problem among primary and middle schools in southwestern and northwestern China, can also be found in central China and even some backward regions in prosperous coastal eastern provinces," said the report, which interviewed students from boarding schools in poor regions in Guangxi, Hubei, Ningxia and Hunan.

A field trip study, conducted by the China Youth Development Foundation (CYDF), also found that for Hope Schools in poor areas, students' meals at school are far from satisfactory. The study cited a lack of enough campus kitchen facilities and the teaching staffs' lack of knowledge about nutrition.

The study, which covered 106 Hope Schools in 17 provinces and autonomous regions around China, revealed that only half of them were equipped with school kitchens, and that about 70 percent of the students complained they usually feel hungry in class.

Hope Schools are the result of Project Hope, which was organized by CYDF to raise charity funds to establish primary schools in China's poverty-stricken areas.

CYDF, which has spent 20 years opening new schools, now is turning its attention to improving kitchens and other campus facilities.

The foundation recently partnered with the multinational food company, Kraft Foods, to launch Kraft Hope Kitchens.

The project's goal is to build 100 kitchens at Hope schools in Anhui, Yunnan, Jilin, Hunan and Hubei by the end of this year.

Kraft will donate kitchen facilities, including refrigerators, microwave ovens and disinfecting equipment, to ensure standard sanitation procedures. US-based Kraft also will dispatch employees and volunteers to offer training on food safety and nutrition to rural school headmasters and teachers.

The project's goal is to end malnutrition for at least 50,000 rural school children.

"Now my students can have clean and healthy food every noon by paying a mere 2 yuan to 3 yuan," Chen Lihua, headmaster at Miaochong Hope School on Dabie Mountain in Anhui province, told China Business Weekly.

"Such a drive will definitely help persuade the public, especially local governments, to pay more attention to malnutrition among rural school kids, and will establish a model for neighboring schools to follow suit," Chen said.

Chen's school is among 10 pilot schools in Anhui that will benefit from the kitchen project this year.

"In the past, many of my students would eat cold steam buns with water at lunch time. Now they can get something hot," said headmaster Chen.

Project Hope over the past 20 years has opened 15,940 schools in China's poverty-stricken areas, enabling almost all poor children in China to receive a compulsory primary education.

"We are planning to further promote standard kitchens to all Hope schools in China next year and set up a unified purchasing and equipment standard for such kitchens," said Wang Min, the CYDF's deputy secretary general.

"Just imagine. At a cost of 30,000 yuan per kitchen, we will be able to provide healthy and nutritious meals to millions of rural students," Wang said.

(China Daily 11/23/2009 page10)