World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

In 2012 WFP is providing support to 1.8 million people across Nepal, focusing on preventing hunger and meeting food and nutrition needs, empowering local communities to build assets that improve long-term food security, and supporting government and partners to develop and implement effective food security and nutrition strategies.

Current activities in Nepal include:

Assistance to Food Insecure Populations in the Mid- and Far-West Hill and Mountain Regions

The protracted relief and recovery operation is WFP’s largest operation in Nepal and will target 1.2 million beneficiaries in 2012. Participants receive food and/or cash in exchange of their work on community asset-building projects, which enable them to meet their short-term food needs whilst constructing productive assets at community level that build medium-term food security safety nets. 

Food and Cash for Assets Activities: WFP’s food/cash-for-assets (F/CFA) activities supports communities in developing resources and enterprises aimed at reducing hunger and the effects of shocks while meeting immediate household food needs. Through the programme, beneficiaries are engaged in projects such as building and repairing roads, irrigation systems, fishery ponds, cash crop cultivation and enhanced micro-agricultural infrastructure. For the most effective coverage and to prevent dependency, WFP assistance is carried out between planting and harvest periods when household food stocks are leanest.

Micronutrient Supplementation Interventions for Children: WFP provides sachets of micronutrient powder (MNP) to young children (6-59 months) of food/cash-for-assets participating households. MNP contains 16 essential vitamins and minerals aimed at reducing high rates of malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies. WFP works closely with the Ministry of Health and Population and other partners to implement this activity.

Country Programme

Through WFP’s Country Programme, 558,400 Nepalese –including direct recipients and their family members -benefit from the following activities:

School Feeding & One Laptop per Child: WFP provides nutritious mid-day meals of fortified wheat-soya-blend to 210,000 primary school students living in 11 Far-Western districts, which effectively improves the nutritional status of children and increases children’s access to education. WFP has also partnered with Open Learning Exchange Nepal to provide laptops and Nepali-language interactive teaching and learning materials to primary schools. The laptops and complementary materials serve to encourage regular school attendance among primary school students and also promote quality education.

Girls’ Incentive Programme (GIP): Around 64,000 school girls receive monthly-take home rations of cooking oil as an incentive for regular school attendance. GIP is implemented together with school feeding in 11 Far Western districts and independently in five Terai districts where girls’ school attendance is very low. In areas where WFP has implemented GIP, rates of girls’ attendance have increased by as much as 27 percent. 

Mother and Child Health Care (MCHC): improves nutritional status of pregnant and lactating mothers and their young children with monthly take-home rations of fortified food. This critically timed intervention reduces irreversible developmental damage from malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies. MCHC programme provides monthly take-home rations of fortified Wheat-Soya-Blend (WSB) food to 40,000 pregnant and lactating mothers and their children (6-36 months) attending health care facilities.

Food Assistance to Refugees from Bhutan: For 18 years, WFP has been providing humanitarian food assistance to tens of thousands of refugees from Bhutan living in seven camps in eastern Nepal. Despite third country resettlement, which began in 2007, food assistance will be needed to support camp residents for years to come. In 2012, WFP will provide daily food rations to more than 50,000 refugees.

Emergency Operations: Disaster Response in Nepal With field presence in 60 of Nepal’s 75 districts supplemented by air operations in the Karnali, WFP has a unique logistical capacity for providing immediate disaster response. Recent operations include providing immediate relief supplies to 170,000 people following major flooding of the Koshi river in October 2008, and extending food assistance to 700,000 additional persons affected by the severe 2008/09 winter drought. Since 2006, WFP has provided emergency food assistance to over one million people in Nepal.

Food Security Monitoring

Armed with personal digital assistants (PDAs) and satellite telephones, 32 field-based staff collect and transmit real-time data on household food security, crop production, and food prices from some of the most remote areas of Nepal. The Nepal Food Security Monitoring and Analysis System (known as NeKSAP when spelt in Nepalese) team in Kathmandu then analyzes the data and develops information on household food security, emerging crises, markets and nutrition from across Nepal.  WFP works in close collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture, the Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the Consumer Interest Protection Forum to produce and ratify reports.

WFP is currently working with the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives (MoAC) to institutionalise the capacity of the system within Government to strengthen national food security monitoring and analysis. The system has been operational in 72 of  75 districts of Nepal.

As part of ongoing food security monitoring activities, the NeKSAP team produces quarterly, Food Security Bulletins, Crop Situation Updates, Market Watch updates and early warning information. These reports are disseminated to the Nepal government and throughout the donor and development community in order to provide critical information on food security and on rural livelihood conditions in Nepal. The primary field-level data which are collected are an unparalleled source of factual information and hence exerts considerable influence on the audience’s perception of food security in the country. In addition, the NeKSAP undertakes emergency needs assessments, produces Food for Thought papers and conducts thematic and sector specific studies.

Please visit http://groups.google.com/group/NeKSAP?hl=en&pli=1 for more food security monitoring data and reports.