In El Salvador WFP works with a wide range of partners including Government, regional and international institutions, NGOs, the UN system and the private sector, and at different levels, from policy development to operational implementation in the field. The key areas of intervention can be rapidly summarized as follows:
- School Meals This is one of WFP’s flagship programmes in the country, which was successfully institutionalized under the full responsibility of the Ministry of Education at the end of 2007. Most important, the very successful hand over to Government resulted in a further strengthening of the partnership between the two institutions, with the signing of a new agreement whereby WFP is assisting national institutions in the procurement, logistics and capacity development of the National School Feeding Programme, now reaching over 875,000 school children in about 4150 schools.
- Mother and Child Health and Nutrition interventions targeting roughly 55,000 vulnerable children under five, lactating mothers and pregnant women, in collaboration with and support to the Ministry of Health’s services.
- Regional Relief and Recovery Operation, implemented to protect vulnerable populations and enhance their ability to respond to recurrent economic and natural disasters shocks. It includes relief, food-for-work and food-for-asset as well as capacity development activities with an emphasis on agricultural production and income diversification.
- Purchase for Progress (P4P): Through this new modality WFP seeks to reduce agricultural households’ vulnerability to food insecurity by leveraging its purchasing power, strengthening local production capacity and stimulating local food markets.
- Emergency Preparedness and Response: WFP El Salvador provides leadership and support at both the national and regional level in this competence area, including:
a) managing the WFP Regional Humanitarian Response Centre for Central America (which since its establishment in mid-2007 already assisted major emergencies in Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Belize and others);
b) leading the development of innovative web based Early-Warning Systems (SATCAweb, or Sistema de Alerta Temprana para Centro America), which has improved the system wide capacity to anticipate potential natural disasters;
c) strengthening national and regional Food Security Monitoring and Nutritional Surveillance Systems to help take informed decisions and anticipate nutritional crisis; as well as
d) by working on disaster preparedness, mitigation and response competences and capacities always in support to national and regional institutions.
- Capacity development and Public Policies: WFP El Salvador is a strong advocate of capacity development activities, which cut across the intervention areas of the CO; and it works intensively in supporting national institutions in public policy development, with a special focus on policies directed to enhancing social protection for the most vulnerable, and fighting child hunger and undernutrition.
- Finally, WFP El Salvador is currently working on strengthening its focus on Climate Change issues, given the country’s high vulnerability and the potential consequences that the CC phenomena is expected to have on people food and nutritional security.