CAPE VERDE:
Feeding for the future
ACHADA FURNA, FOGO ISLAND, 30 October (IRIN) - The primary
school at
Achada Furna lies high up in the hills of the Cape Verde island of
Fogo.
Local families live mainly off agriculture, selling vegetables,
livestock
and cheese. If there is a surplus, farmers may give it to the school,
making their own contribution to a long-running meals-for-school
children
programme run by the UN World Food Programme (WFP).
Head teacher Vanda Lucia Alves, 26, is used to overseeing meal breaks
as
well as lessons. Every morning and afternoon dozens of children aged
between six and 14 file into the school canteen for a meal of rice and
bean stew. Sometimes this is supplemented by canned meat.
Alves said these free meals were vital for keeping kids in school. "The
financial conditions faced by people living in this area simply don?t
make
it possible to provide good food at home. You will often find children
arriving here hungry," she told IRIN.
Alves stressed that well-fed children also perform considerably better
in
class. "They are brighter, much more alert. You can see a clear
difference
once they have eaten," she said.
The WFP provides the food for free and meals are dished out in over 450
primary and pre-primary schools in the Cape Verde Islands, an arid
archipelago of volcanic islands that protrude from the Atlantic Ocean
off
the coast of West Africa.
In a country with a very modest agricultural base, heavily dependent on
expensive food imports, the free meals service has proved critical in
boosting school enrolment. Cape Verde now has close to a 100 per cent
primary school attendance record, amongst the best in sub-Saharan
Africa.
With 40 per cent of the population under 14, Cape Verde has had to
invest
heavily in education, trying also to ensure equal access to schooling
for
girls and boys.
Teachers say they are happy to see classrooms full, but warn that
conditions are still extremely difficult.
"There are still many things here that are not as they should be," said
Alcides Andrade Mendes, the young head teacher of the primary school at
Monte Grande, another village on Fogo. "The condition of the building
is
one concern. Then there are the teaching materials. We have a long way
to
go."
Cape Verde?s Education Minister, Victor Borges, makes no secret of the
difficulties ahead and admits that Cape Verde has used "unorthodox"
solutions in order to ensure that every child gets at least some
schooling.
The government has rented buildings to use as extra classrooms and
packed
in two or even three shifts per day at each school and has employed
under-qualified teachers, but, said Borges, "all with the objective of
leaving no child outside the school system".
In the 1980s, Cape Verde set a target of four years mandatory school
attendance for every child on the nine inhabited islands in the
archipelago. That was pushed up to six years in the 1990s. But Borges
has
warned that a generalised access to education must be combined with an
increase in quality.
While there is now a widespread acceptance of the importance of
education
in Cape Verde, the tragedy is that school-leavers find no job
opportunities awaiting them and most long for a chance to emigrate to
Europe or the United States.
Fifteen years ago Veronica Maria Lopes Tavarez, known to friends and
family as ?Vera?, featured in a WFP video on school feeding programmes
as
a six-year-old.
Now aged 21, Vera has spent the past three years at home in the village
of
Sao Domingos Pinha on Santiago island, waiting in vain for a
scholarship
or grant to get into higher education.
Vera does not regret the years she spent studying, nor does she resent
the
good fortune of other school-friends who have gone on to study in
Portugal
and Brazil.
"They had money and we don?t," she explained in a resigned manner. Her
family lives off the land, selling a few basic crops and raising
livestock.
Youth unemployment in Sao Domingos, as elsewhere in Cape Verde, is
high.
Vera says she would prefer to have a job now than wait to go to
college.
"I have seen what my family needs and that is the best way I can help
them," she said.[