Jordan Times
Friday, February 13, 2004
More students benefit from School Nutrition Programme
By Dalya Dajani
AMMAN — Around 2,000 schoolchildren from the Kingdom's impoverished southern communities began their school year with a nutritious snack programme aimed at boosting their health and enhancing their academic performance.
Already supporting some 24,000 schoolchildren in nine education directorates, the government added schools in Petra, Shobak and Al Mudawarra to its School Nutrition Programme (SNP) for the 2003-2004 academic year.
The SNP, carried out jointly by the Planning Ministry's Social Productivity Programme (SPP) and the Ministry of Education (MoE), provides students with a daily mid-morning snack containing essential vitamins that most of these children lack.
SPP head Omar Rafie told The Jordan Times that efforts have been ongoing since 1999 to continue expanding the programme's base of beneficiaries to ensure that it would eventually include all schoolchildren.
“We're continuously looking ahead to increase the number of students who can benefit from the SNP which has been serving to benefit thousands of schoolchildren across the country,” said Rafie.
“These three areas in the south were identified as being in need and have thus been included under the JD1 million budget allocation for the SNP in the academic 2003-2004 year,” he added.
Under the SNP, each child is provided with a mid-morning snack consisting of a 200-millilitre carton of UHT milk, 70 grammes of high protein biscuits fortified with vitamins A and D and iron, in addition to a piece of fruit every day.
The snack provides children with the needed daily nutritional intake and is often the only meal many of these impoverished children have during their day.
Knowing that a school snack was awaiting them has also reduced absenteeism.
Suad Amre, a headmistress at Ariha School in Karak, told The Jordan Times earlier that the SNP had cut the rate of absences, which ran at about 30 per cent to almost zero.
The meal served as a driving force even when a student was ill, said Amre.
The national programme was launched after national surveys conducted in 1990 revealed serious health deficiencies among needy schoolchildren — particularly vitamins A and D, and iron deficiencies, which affect learning abilities.
Seeking to improve children's health status and subsequently their educational performance, the government extended the SNP to make it include 10,000 schoolchildren from Aqaba, Maan, Tafileh, Karak, South Shuneh, North Badia and Deir Alla in the Jordan Valley at a cost of JD773,000 back in 1999.
A double phase survey carried out by the Jordan University of Science and Technology on 1,037 out of 10,000 schoolchildren who initially came into benefiting from the SNP revealed a 28 per cent increase in the children's energy levels and better nutritional intakes of protein (25 per cent), vitamin A (30 per cent), iron (25 per cent) and calcium (25 per cent).
Moreover, results showed a drop in the prevalence of anemia, from 18 per cent to 15.5 per cent, in the students surveyed after the first phase.
According to Rafie, the MoE has issued a tender for an updated health survey for new indicators on the impact of the school nutrition programme on students who have been benefiting from the snack for the past three years.
The results should be ready by the end of this scholastic term, he added
Meanwhile, the SPP official noted that the success of the SNP has stood out as a model for other international organisations that have recently expressed interest in learning from the methodologies and experiences of the programme.
“We've had contacts showing interest in gaining from our experience with this programme in order to replicate elsewhere in the region and other parts of the world,” said Rafie.
“The success of the SNP is a source of pride for us as this programme was designed, financed and being implemented through the concerted efforts of Jordanian organisations and individuals, who through efficient coordination have made it possible.”