The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), with €60 million financial support from the European Union (EU), is helping end child labor in Egypt through enhancing access to education, especially for girls, by providing them with a daily nutritious snack in class as well as take-home food rations for their families.
Up to 400,000 family members of children, who maintain an 80 percent attendance rate, receive a monthly take-home food ration consisting of 10 kg of rice and one litre of oil. The value of the take-home ration compensates for the wage a child would earn at work. The daily in-school snack – date bars enriched with vitamins and minerals – provides the children with 25 percent of their daily required nutritional needs. Take-home rations and in-school fortified snacks relieve vulnerable families of around 20 percent of their monthly expenditure on food, encouraging them to keep their children in school.
In 2014, more than 235,000 children across Egypt benefited from WFP’s school feeding programme. WFP plans to encourage an additional 100,000 children, who were previously working or at risk of entering the labor market, to attend community schools by implementing the four-year project – ‘Enhancing Access of Children to Education and Fighting Child Labour’ – in 16 of the most vulnerable and poorest areas in Egypt. The aim is to tackle some of the most critical issues affecting country’s poorest children: under nutrition, access to quality primary education, and child labor.
“In those rural and remote areas, girls’ education is not a priority for the families. The concept they have is the girl is going to get married and stay home, so if they need to get one of their children educated, they’re going to focus on the boys. With our project, we focus on the girls because we feel we are their chance to get an education. Whenever I speak to the girls, they’re always just so enthusiastic about actually going to school. They don’t just feel good about getting an education and getting a chance to take a different path: ‘Maybe I’m not just going to get married and have kids and raise them. Maybe I can actually become someone.’ They’re also helping their family out,” explained Amina Al Korey, communications officer for the WFP in Egypt.
The joint project aims to provide 50,000 mothers with training on income-generating activities like breeding goats, selling vegetables, and making soap and detergents, to help them provide for their families rather than send their children out to work.
In Egypt, 15 percent of children end up working to help support their families. At least 1.6 million children are involved in hazardous work. More than 30 percent children aged 6 to 59 months are stunted, which is classified as a “high” percentage by the World Health Organization.
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