 Welcome everyone to this international technical webinar on homegrown school feeding. This webinar is jointly organized by the SAO eLearning Academy and WFP. And it is actually to launch an eLearning course that is now available in English, French and Spanish on homegrown schools. So and we will be giving you the link later, later in the presentation. So today for this launch, we have an extremely rich program. We have the honor of having with us various representatives from SAO. So we have the director of the nutrition division. This is Anna Larte. We also have Carmen Bourbano from WFP, Florence Tartanac also who's a nutrition officer. We have the honor of having with us the ambassador of the African Union and NEPAD, Mr. Habadou Saha. We also have representatives from EFAD from the Imperial College of London and also from the Global Child Nutrition Foundation. The program will be extremely rich and we will be trying to manage all the different, the timing during the speaker's presentations. I also wanted to mention that this is one of a series of international technical webinars that are regularly being delivered together with Agrinium and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for the Pacific. So we regularly deliver these webinars and you can have access to the recordings of the previous webinars directly on the FAE Learning Academy in the section in the webinar section. So without further ado, I would like to give the floor to Mrs. Anna Larte, the director of the FAE Nutrition Division. Anna, the floor is yours. Thank you. Okay, hello, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much, Christina, for the introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, it's a pleasure to welcome you to this webinar on home grown school feeding program. This year has been an exceptional and challenging year for the entire world. COVID-19 has really challenged all of the world's systems from transportation systems, banking systems, health systems, food systems, you name it. Interruptions to essential nutrition services by COVID is estimated to cost an additional 6.7 million wasted children on top of the pre-COVID number of 14.9 million. COVID-19 has disrupted essential service to school children all over the world. Over 670 million children lost access to this essential school feeding program available to them. Interruptions in home grown school feeding program did not only affect school children, but also the smallholder farmers that supply the nutritious foods for keeping the system running. In fact, we need to build resilience into the home grown school feeding programs so that should such a pandemic happen in future, this valuable service to children and smallholders will be protected. COVID-19 has been supporting home grown school feeding program through the FAO school food and nutrition approach, which provides a comprehensive framework to assist countries in the design implementation of school food and nutrition policies and programs. The approach links healthy school meals, food and nutrition education, while building capacities for sustainable procurement and value chain development. The home grown school feeding program can contribute to the achievement of several of the sustainable development goals. I list a few here. SDG 1, no poverty, 2, zero hunger, 3, good health and well-being, 4, equality education, 8, decent work in economic development, economic growth, and 10, reduce inequalities. In terms of FAO's collaboration with the RUM based agency, the RUM based agencies have joined forces to create a resource framework for the design implementation and scale up of country led home grown school feeding programs. This framework, or this resource framework is aligned with a framework for the global action plan on child wasting. Many governments are increasingly sourcing food for school feeding locally from smallholder farmers. Home grown school feeding programs also provide economic benefits for local communities. Home grown school feeding programs combine many opportunities, and I will highlight a few. The education sector provides an infrastructure through which home grown school feeding programs can function. In return, home grown school feeding programs help children to gain access to, participate in, and benefit from schooling. In the health and nutrition sector, home grown school feeding programs provide opportunities for important complementary services, including health and nutrition monitoring of children and vaccinations. The agriculture sector can provide supply side support in helping farmers and small local entrepreneurs to engage in formal markets. In return, home grown school feeding programs can provide a stable demand for food production for producers as needed. Social protection programs can provide households with a livelihood support that enables their children to participate in school. In return, home grown school feeding programs provide livelihood opportunities through demand and payment of services. Ladies and gentlemen, today's webinar will present the key elements of the home grown school feeding program e-learning course, which aims to support the planning, design, and implementation of such a program. We will also discuss the importance of partnerships as a nebless of a successful home grown school feeding program. First note, I thank you for your participation. Christina, the floor is back to you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Anna. And I would like now to give the floor to Mrs. Carmel Burano, who is the director of WFP school feeding division. So, Carmen, the floor is yours. Thank you very much. And it's nice to be on the screen with all of the panelists. It's lovely to see you, even just on the camera, but it's nice to know that you're nearby. Although, Arlene, I know you're very, very far away and it's very, very early for you. Welcome to all of you to this, to this, to this great webinar. I have the task to really introduce the topic of home grown school feeding to in this meeting. And so let me, let me try and share my screen with you so I can share a presentation that we prepared. Can you confirm if you guys are seeing my screen? Okay, great. So my task really is to set us off with some common understanding of what we're talking about. I think many of the people that are joining this webinar probably are very familiar with home grown school feeding so my job is quite easy. I do want to acknowledge that as we're launching this specific training tool through our partnership with FAO, and also in partnership with EFAD with the Global Child Nutrition Foundation with the partnership for child development. A growing topic of conversation. I was actually just before joining this call in a call about the preparations for the Global Food Summit for the Global Food Systems Summit of 2021. And the issue of home grown school feeding and the fact that these programs are really food systems in and of themselves because they really look across the supply chain from the farmer to the consumer which is the child and everything in between. So it's really no surprise that they have been so popularly accepted and adopted by governments around the world. So let me just start by perhaps just proposing a common definition and of course this is part of the resource framework that is the basis for this training. So when we talk about home grown school feeding programs, we really talk about programs that feed children in schools, but that use locally grown and procured commodities food. And so that also translates into diverse and nutritious meals, and it supports resilience building in communities so we can see the definition is quite interesting it's quite broad, and perhaps I'll just stay here and unpack this a little bit. There are various ways of doing school feeding. And we see many models around the world and we always like to say there's no one size fits all approach in several countries there are many models within the same country. In some cases it's really not possible to have local procurement to food because of the context. But in most of the countries that we know of there was some interest and in many countries large scale implementation of programs that really make the effort to connect the production of small holder farmers to the food that the children receive in school and so that connection that intention to connect farmers with children and with the food is what we call home grown school feeding. Let me let me move to a second slide to go a little bit deeper into some of the characteristics of these programs. As I was mentioning, the issue of local procurement is key is, you know, where and who produces the food and how that food is being procured that is really at the crux of all of this now. We've been discussing for the last 10 years, discussing what local means, what how local is local and and whether local means next to the school whether it means at the district level, whether local means within a country. So the conclusion that local is whatever it makes sense in that context, and the more local the better, basically, if the trade offs allow it so this word is really meant to signify the intention that the food that is procured for these programs, be as as close as possible to the beneficiaries to the intended beneficiaries. But of course there are trade offs that we might understand we must understand to be able to make sure these programs are effective and efficient. The second thing of course is that this is focused these programs are focused, not just on education, but also on the promotion of local agriculture. Here the partnerships with ministries of agriculture with local associations with local governments that are supporting the capacity of local associations is really important. So we're also talking about really important partnership, at least between education and agriculture, but the other third sector which is really important as health. And how do we support that local agriculture is one of the primary preoccupations of programs that are that are set up in this way. So really important beneficiary of these programs, if they are done in such a way that they are designed to benefit our small holder farmers and trade ours. We're talking about a good understanding of the local food systems and the production systems in countries, and being able to identify what those small holder farmer and farmer associations need to be able to connect to that market which school feeding programs represent which is really important. I've talked about the multi sectoral approach, a little bit in terms of the connections between the different sectors, but one thing which is really important and I would say is at the base of a lot of the government efforts around this is that this is really important in terms of government and local ownership, both of communities local governments but also a country as a whole, and how these programs become more sustainable, the more localized they are. And so that's another big characteristic of these programs. Okay, so it's also important to understand why we would care, you know, why go through the trouble of setting up an approach, which is a complex endeavor, it's not easy to deal with several pieces of the supply chain and several sectors, etc. There are many reasons why we would do this, but one of them is that in many low income countries. And there is a market problem. There's there's production, especially through small holder farmers in most of these low income countries in in Africa specifically a huge amount of that production is produced in small holder farmer plots of land and also aggregated through associations, but there's a problem in terms of connection to markets and school feeding programs represent an enormous market. We know that around 400 million children receive food each year through national programs. If we multiply what each child eats per day and we multiply that by 400 million, and we multiply that by 365 days or so. Then we're talking about tons and tons and tons of food. So this is a very big market. And it's also quite stable. So it's, it's, it's a good opportunity to make sure that there's an incentive for small holder farmers to connect to that market. There's another really important reason why these programs are important. And that is because locally grown food is more closely associated with what children culturally are used to eating. It could be tailored to different regions of the country that have different cultural and nutrition patterns, and children can learn to eat in a context specific way what is grown locally in their regions. We were talking about promoting national ownership. It's very important to note that governments are very much interested in these programs because they support nearest parts of the economy. And as I was saying, it supports the agriculture side, the education side social protection and in general creates human capital. And so it's also a really good opportunity to create intersectoral programming and planning within the government but also in local government structures. You have here some of the summaries in terms of what are the different benefits of a homegrown school feeding program I won't go through all of them, but I think the point of this slide is to show how multiple benefits can be reaped from these programs. Basically reaching many, many, many SDGs related to human capital like education nutrition and health, but also resilience related to agriculture community development and in general, economic development for communities so if we put in place all of these different programs together we really have quite a powerful safety net which is, we think, one of the major reasons why governments decide to invest in these programs is really because of this, the multiplicity of these factors of these benefits that really come up with some sizeable returns. We've been doing an analysis with Harvard University lately to quantify the results of the benefits of school feeding and for every dollar invested in school feeding in homegrown school feeding. We know that between 10 and $17 or so are put back in terms of productivity and dollars that are reinvested in the community so this is a really good investment for governments, especially because of this multiplicity of benefits. Now, that's the theory. The practice of course is a little bit more complicated and it's never very straightforward. We know that globally there's been a tendency over the last 20 years or so to transition towards more homegrown school feeding approaches through governments. This is in many cases driven by political commitments. One of the very important statements was in 2004 for example through NEPAD and the African Union that decided and committed to moving forward the idea of homegrown school feeding in the continent and we know that that that political commitment really sparked a huge movement within Africa but we also see that in other continents, Brazil for example being a very good example of a country that has put in practice at scale these programs. So for example, in the 61 countries that WFP supports, 42 of them are implementing some form of a homegrown school feeding program so this is quite an important scale. And we know that about 80% of the food that is purchased is purchased locally and a lot of it within the country. So these programs have achieved a certain amount of scale, but there's still a lot to learn and a lot to think about in terms of the challenges that we're seeing governments mulling over on the ground. So let me just share with you some of the challenges that we observe. The scale up of these of these experiences has been a challenge for a lot of governments. We see pilots being implemented in different parts of countries, but there's very few countries that have managed to scale this up to a government, a country wide program of an important scale. We have interesting exceptions to that Nigeria for example Ghana and I mentioned Brazil so there are countries that have managed to really set this up and set their policy and legal frameworks to match what the the implementation looks like on the ground but we do know that there are several challenges that need to be brought to the table. So there's an issue about resource availability. And now, in the wake of the coven crisis we know that there are even more restrictions to access to resources from governments, fiscal space is shrinking. And so this issue will always be a problem in many of the countries, especially the WFP supports sustainability issues and how we are collectively helping and supporting governments to make the decisions and make the political commitments, especially in the face of these shrinking budgets to prioritize these multi sectoral programs. Very concretely, we've seen throughout the period of the last two decades, one of the major issues with implementation of home girls school feeding programs is the issue of food safety and quality, because the lower the procurement is done the closer to the more difficult that becomes to check and to be able to guarantee the safety and quality of that food. So that is a very big preoccupation that somehow we are working. All of us together, the organizers of this webinar to really support governments and improve that that issue and issues around poor storage, especially supporting small holder farmers make sure that the food isn't lost before it goes to the market and before it could be cooked in the schools is is always a very important issue. And depending on the context I'll add another one, depending on the context these programs of course have several tradeoffs. And we also know that one of the preconditions for these programs is that there has to be some sort of stability in the context so countries that are dealing with conflict countries that are dealing with a lot of instability, have problems with implementing a program that really requires a bit of a stable context in which different actors can really work together. COVID has brought its own slew of problems, not just for this particular conversation but as we all know, it has affected all of us in our lives, but specifically on this topic. Logistics has become more complicated as movements are restricted we know this for example from experiences we're hearing from on duras that as as lockdowns happen. The issue of movements of basically supply chains are being affected. We are seeing disruption to markets, affecting prices affecting farm inputs and different types of inputs that these programs require to be able to be successful and that's another. And that's another issue but we do know, and we do have several experiences and examples of governments and partners that have redesigned the programs thought about how to work through these issues, and come out the other side with programs that are more resilient to these kinds of shocks. Let me just end with a couple of opportunities because this is a really important platform to broaden partnerships and I think this webinar, the training module that has been put together is a really important example of how different organizations have come together to support governments and what is a really valuable multi sectoral platform. It also is a really good vehicle to enhance resource mobilization from the private sector from communities that see themselves as beneficiaries to the economic benefits that programs of this nature provide. There's an enormous amount of support for these programs in 2016 the African Union, the heads of state of the African Union committed to prioritizing home growth school feeding for the continent we see Africa, really as the as a leader in political commitment in these in these programs, but this is also happening in other in other regions of the world, and there is opportunity to leverage that political commitment and increasing political will. There is also a lot of different organizations that increase that are increasing the knowledge that we have of these programs and I have to say, I've been involved in home grown school feeding. In one way or another for the last 15 years and our knowledge of these of these particular interventions at the country level has increased enormously through the collaboration of the partners in this webinar. So we know much more today about the trade offs about the challenges and we can provide a lot of the technical assistance that has been actually culminating into the resource framework that we that we have as the basis for this online training. And two more really important opportunities now and moving forward. The opportunity really to look at how to enhance intersect all approaches and really linking different activities not just home grown school feeding, but also livelihood approaches food security program school health and nutrition programs to not just enhance the access to farmers and support farmers but also the nutrition and the health services that children receive in school. And again, we always talk a little bit about the impact of the pandemic and cove it as of course presenting a challenge for us. But it is also an opportunity to look at the programs that are being implemented by governments at the moment and how we can collectively support them to make the best use out of those resources by benefiting the most amount of beneficiaries as possible. Thank you so much Christina, and I look forward to the rest of the of the of the webinar. Thank you there. Thank you very much for this excellent presentation on the basic concepts principles, the importance and also the challenges and opportunities related to home grown school feeding programs. Thank you very much, Carmen. Since, since the African Union and NEPAD is one of our partners in this initiative and also in the design and development of the of the e learning courses I would like to give the floor to Haladu Salha, who is the ambassador of the African Union and NEPAD. The floor is yours. Okay, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to join this webinar because he's talking about an important key issue, which is of interest to all African countries, and as stated by my previous my predecessor. Of course, there is, I may say, a very encouraging type of alliance around this important issue. And as it was said, home grown school feeding is by its nature and concept should be, of course, a country led multi partner alliance initiative when the country government in the diving seat. So moreover, the key principles applying to this great initiative are leadership and ownership by the government. To be translated, of course, into firm and long term commitment in terms of resources. The sources meaning of course finance logistic human expertise, but also institutional coordination. So, this is why I may say the role of the government should be as follows. This is a very clear and constant briefing to the local communities, meaning agriculture produces in the country of targeted schools and who also are the parents of the students to develop on partners to the domestic private sector, but also to other stakeholders on the rationale behind the home grown school feeding program. Of course, should create the enabling environment by mainstreaming the home grown school feeding program into existing national agriculture and nutrition for security investment plan. And we are happy that based on the card up implementation process. Most of the African countries have already their national investment plan ready and we are now implementing the second phase of this implementation process. Finally, we may need to establish a formal alliance, a type of agreement with the coordination mechanism. So, of course, in most of the countries we have different type of school feeding activities, but if you want to implement a home grown school feeding program. We need to have a well defined formal alliance. On the other hand, as I said, for the government, we need a high political will by adopting if necessary and I think it's required elicited text. I'm sure that we have the subsequent regular financial resources to be allocated to this program. And in particular, here we have a key role of the parliament because the parliament being the representatives of the parents or the students but also those who are the spokespeople from the those who are living on the ground. They have also their role to play. So we need in terms of advocacy but also in terms of commitment to have the parliament playing a key role. Furthermore, the government should assist in building institutional and technical capacity of the smallholder farmers to enable them to become reliable and competitive entrepreneurs and partners because I said previously in the presentation that we have been listening to the smallholder farmers being in Africa, I may say the bulk of the main investors in the agriculture sector, they may need to have really a strong support in terms of institutional capacity to be sure that they will be really reliable allies for this program. Furthermore, as I said we have very different type of school activities if you have if you need to have a home ground school feeding activity in the country. The government should undertake a current and progressive harmonization of school feeding relating activities across and among global partners working in school feeding in a given country in order if so required to align to the concept of a real home ground school feeding program. The government should pursue also mobilizing further resources combined when slowly increasing contribution from local community because as I said at the very beginning, the ownership should be in the hands of the local community because they are the parents of the children but they are also those who will be benefiting from this school feeding program. So they should be involved at the very beginning of the initiative and we should try to ensure that they will be contributing regularly in terms of maybe in kind contribution but also later on when wherever is possible a kind of financial contribution if possible. We have also the government to pursue if possible to mobilize the buying in of domestic private sector in particular those who are working in this sector because when we have to proceed with the implementation of the home ground school feeding activity. In particular when you're talking about food processing, but also food purchase, food transport, food storage. You have the domestic private sector who will be involved so I think we have also the government to subsidize and mobilize this domestic private sector to buy in and to contribute to the financing of the home ground school feeding activity. So at least I may say at the end the government should undertake regular monitoring and evaluation to measure the level of accountability for all stakeholders because in terms of contribution to the home ground school feeding activity, what is very important is to have predictable resources. Therefore, if we have the allowance that I mentioned at the very beginning, we have to be sure that all stakeholders who are committed should of course allocate the resources on time and to be sure also that when we have to undertake the evaluation to be sure that each of them have been meeting their commitments. So these are the key let's say roles for the government because as I said, the home ground school feeding activity should be coordinated by the government of a given country. This is why I think it's first a policy decision, but also a political will in a given country. So thank you very much for time being up to you. Thank you. Thank you very much ambassador for underlying the importance of multi stakeholders contribution to these programs and also the potential role of parliamentarians thank you very much. I would like to give the floor now to my colleague Florence tartanac who is an attrition officer in a fail Florence the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Christina. Thank you very much for all the colleagues. It's really a pleasure to have all of you here because it's a journey that we started some time ago, three years ago actually with at the initiative of WFP to start this resource framework and to put together this this group and this partnership know so in 2017 we were so WFP for sure. The FAO, the Global Child Nutrition Foundation and the partnership for child development PCD and and if add and they pad so we are all here together to present the result of this work. First with the preparation of the resource framework itself so the resource framework is a knowledge product that tries to harmonize also existing knowledge and tools and also build on the wealth of expertise of all these partners and it was very interesting for that. It also fosters the partnerships to help government know to achieve their goals and lays the ground for a community of practice on ongoing school feeding for achieving impact a scale. So I will give like a journey through through the e-learning course. This e-learning course is on the platform of FAO but also on the platform of WFP and I'm not sure maybe the other partners could confirm but it should be also on the platform for any of the partners involved. And it's a course that is of free access and you just need to register in the website to access to it. And it is targeted to to be used by a program practitioners in countries, policymakers, development partners, governments, civil society and also community based organization and private sector so everybody that is interested and involved in this kind of programs can take it and can benefit from it. So the e-learning as I said is based on the resource framework on two document, a technical document which was quite detailed and big and a synopsis. And as explained by Carmen, there are already a number of innovative approaches not to ongoing school feeding in the world but has been successfully tested and implemented in various countries and also at different stages of the programming and implementation cycle. So this program, this training and the resource framework is based on this experience and this training to document the experiences also to leverage and ensure impact at scale in line with the targets of the 2030 agenda. And so depending on the context, we may require this systematic approach to particular challenges. So how to develop a new on-ground school feeding program, for example, or how to design it, how to implement it in a way that allows scale up, how to bring a successful on-ground school feeding pilot program to scale. So there are different situations where we could adapt and see what could be useful for each participant to see the part that they need and they can be using. So the four modules of the e-learning lays the ground for approaches that support the establishment of and scale up of on-ground school feeding programs and provide a basis for partnerships, for investment, technical assistance, policy dialogue and learning at local, national and global levels. So I will not go back to the definition of on-ground school feeding because Carmen did it already very well and she explained very well how we managed to harmonize the different concept and establish some kind of common understanding of on-ground school feeding. And so this resource framework also managed to do that. We had a lot of discussion at the beginning about this concept and we managed to agree on them and this resource framework and e-learning are based on this discussion and this agreement. So as also Carmen explained very well, we can see also benefits and multiple benefits of on-ground school feeding for different groups and sectors, mainly for smaller farmers but also different stakeholders along the value chain. And in many contexts, small family farmers and entrepreneurs are poor rural actors who may benefit greatly from on-ground school feeding market opportunities including through increased turnover and profit. And in addition, depending on the local cultural context, small traders, small processors, small and medium rural enterprises, often run by women, are important and they can promote, increase also gender equity in all these kind of programs. So it's important to look at them with this holistic approach and also what the course is doing. The first lesson was on the definition and understanding of the kind of program and then the second lesson is going into the planning and how it focuses on two main preparatory steps required for planning sustainable and effective programs that respond to the need of the population and take into consideration the priorities and capacities of the government. So first they need a long-term vision and political commitment. This was also highlighted by Mr. Aladou Salah about the very important aspect of the political commitment and also defining the broad and long-term changes that stakeholders and particularly the government aim to achieve with on-ground school feeding. It's really a long-term kind of program. You cannot just have this kind of program for short period. So it's important to have this in mind and it's also important to adequate and precise context analysis and assessment because each situation is different. So we really need to explore the needs that can be addressed by on-grown in the country and developing an understanding of the different existing environments and opportunities that can support this vision. So the course going to much details about how to plan this kind of program and how to fully take into account the national context. So we talk about the vision and political commitment and also context analysis, looking at need assessment, local food system and existing national capacities where we can really take them into account and plan the best program possible. Then we are moving to the designing and implementing of the programs. So it's very important to translate the outcomes of all the assessment and discussion into clear goals, objectives and institutional implementation arrangement for the program to really have the main aim of maximizing the program benefits while maintaining cost and risk at manageable levels. So implementing it's really a challenge as Carmen explained it. And so we are looking at the different ways of doing it and as we said it's really depending on the context. But the strategy also can be integrated into broader strategic document and policy for school feeding and as well as can be standard on instruments. So it's very also it's possible to adapt it to the different situations and a stage of the programs. Also, we are looking at the key factors that are behind the implementation and designing of the program. So we already talked about the key role of the governments and also look not only the national government but also the local governments in most of the countries this program are quite decentralized. And also the importance of the strategy that is behind it and that can change greatly. Finally, we are also we are still looking at the designing and implementing the program and the different stages and the component of it. So we have to define as a program objectives, the main menu design, which is very important, ensuring food quality, food safety and quality. This was also mentioned by Carmen. Linking small older farmers and local actors to schools or looking at the whole value chain behind the schools to ensure the supply. Also addressing gender and this is very important in particular for this kind of program. As women are very important role in both the supply but also in being at helping at the school level. We have to maximize the synergies between the different programs, not only school feeding programs that also for example in FAO or EFAD with agricultural program when we are supporting small farmers to improve a production. This is important to link these programs to on-ground school feeding and also building an enabling environment to have all the pieces together. And finally, the last lesson where we look at how to monitor and evaluate this program, it is important to have this component in place while most of this program are funded by governments and governments need to to report to the governing institutions and to be transparent and responsible for what they are doing. So really really label and timely monitoring and reporting are essential for ensuring the efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability of the program. And also good monitoring and reporting serve to ensure accountability of the use of resources and also learning in order to inform targeting and management decision and continuous improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of the program. And also obviously generation of evidence about the achievements and which forms of the basis for successful sustainable resource mobilization. And yes, also component of the monitoring and evaluation and how to look at them in a sustainable way to have this accountability and the use of resources. So the e-learning is, as I was saying, is available for everybody. We also have an innovative feature recently added in the FAO e-learning academy, which is a digital badge certifications, which so at the end of the course you can take. If you're interested in the final evaluation exam and you will be provided with a digital badge certification and these digital badges are online visual representation of learn skills and achievement and in learning environment. So they are already have been adopted by a wide range of sectors in learning environment and they are being used to recognize both accredited and non accredited long learning in formal informal and non formal settings. And as Christina also announced at the beginning. So now the e-learning and also the resource frameworks actually are available, not only in English, but also Spanish and French. So here you can have the direct link. So this will be circulated after the event, not the webinar. So direct links to the e-learning in the different languages. And if you need more details and information, we have also the technical document of the resource framework, also in the free languages. Thanks to WFP contribution for the translation into French and Spanish and for both the resource framework and the e-learning. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Florence. Thank you very much for the detailed presentation of the e-learning course. I will be giving a little bit more details afterwards before we conclude for the participants just for them to know all the presentations and all the links will be provided through the FAE Learning Academy on the webinar section. You have all the, you can download all the materials, even the recording of this webinar. So now I would like to give the floor to our colleague from EFAD, Joyce and Joro. Joyce, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Christina. And thank you very much. And it's a pleasure to be in this webinar today to also share the experiences from EFAD. And I would like to start by following up from what Kamen talked about. She said there are several benefits of homegrown school feeding. And I'll basically be looking at the benefits of smallholder farmers. So the homegrown school feeding initiative provides an excellent opportunity for collaboration. And in particular for roam-based agencies collaboration because it enables the three agencies to come in within their comparative advantages and complementary actions towards achieving a number of targets which are related to food and nutrition security. The comparative advantage of EFAD is that it links its investment projects which address smallholder farmers' production and market constraints with schools serving as a potential market for their produce. So it is therefore an opportunity to help smallholder farmers to also access public purchasing programs, or in other words, institutional procurement, which are otherwise more likely to be exploited by large-scale farmers or through imports. So the key entry points of interest of EFAD would include also nutrition-sensitive value chains, which also create linkages from the farm to the school and to school meals. So the homegrown school feeding also provides an opportunity to improve community engagement and organizational capacity building of smallholder farmers, market access and increasing income. And this is particularly important to note because there are schools almost everywhere, including in marginal areas. So there is a big potential market that is yet to be fully exploited. The integrated school meal programs may therefore open also new prospects of relevance to EFAD's rural transformation agenda that includes promotion of youth empowerment of women, promoting resilience and nutrition of the rural people. And the EFAD looks at the homegrown school feeding holistically along agricultural value chains and within their food systems approach. So I'll share one example of a project in Burundi, and this is a value chain development program which was designed in 2016 and ends in 2022. It has a target beneficiaries of 5,341 households. And the main objective of this project was to promote increases in incomes and improvements in food security for poor households in the program area. And the specific objectives here was to increase physical productive capital by building the resilience of production systems to climate change. And also intensifying crop and livestock farming to improve nutritional status and ultimately structure the milk and rice value chains, which are also linked to schools. Then the third one was to promote youth employment and strengthen capacity of actors. So this project is a collaboration between the three Rome based agencies FAO, WFP, and also together with the private sector, working collectively along the milk value chain to provide milk in school meals. So the three agencies had different roles. So if I provided farmers with the cows, about 3000 and training with relevant inputs, also including improved animal husbandry practices, and also supported the establishment of local milk collection centers, which aggregate milk from 12 farmer cooperatives which are also established through the project. And from there, the milk is transported to the main collection center where the milk quality is tested and stored. And this is where the linkage now to the private sector comes in. So the modern dairy from Burundi collects the milk from the main collection centers and transports it to the factory where it is processed. So then from the from there then the milk is distributed now to schools it's procured by WFP. So WFP, and it is integrated into the other school meals program ongoing school meals program. And it's targeting children from grade one to grade five. And FAO is supporting the production of a quality animal feed, which is produced by a feed processing unit. So what, what have we seen so far from this. So, and apart from the fact that the milk, I mean it's reaching the children. And each of them I think almost daily they are getting about a quarter liter of milk per child per day in grade one to five. The other benefits also is that it has created 622 or more sustainable jobs for young people. And also like also that that's that's jobs but then there are also other micro enterprises that have also come up and benefiting more than 2000 young people, both men and men and women boys and girls or men and women. And because the program was was designed on a pass on kind of a strategy. So the 3000 cows that started the program now we have 5577 households which are benefited from these animals. And this generating annual increase in milk production and also income to these households. So women have also organized themselves now that they are getting money from there from this enterprise into associations and savings and credit schemes. And through these they have diversified their investments. And now they don't only keep cattle but they have also now pigs they have livestock and they have they are also growing vegetables, and many other kind of activities that have expanded just from that one one investment. And then also there are many other businesses that have mushroomed also kind of along the value chain. So, and this includes production of fodder and selling of fodder food processing like cheese and yogurt milk bars, a lot of other many many little little kind of a businesses which are benefiting both the young people, and also the women. And then one other thing that maybe has also come up is that the care practices to children have improved. At least they say that they have more money so they are paying school fees they are buying food they are building houses, and even procuring small pieces of land which they use for farming and other other purposes. So this this so in a nutshell, what I just wanted to show you is that only one line of benefits when it comes to the homegrown school feeding. And without even going to the other many benefits that we know from from the children who are benefiting from this, but this is what I wanted to share with you for today. Thank you. Thank you very much. Joyce also for underlying the importance of adopting an integrated and holistic approach, and also the importance of collaboration in these types of program. I would like now to give the floor to Arlene Mitchell, who is the executive director of the Global Child Nutrition Foundation, which is one of our partners also in the design and development of the eLearning course. So Arlene, the floor is yours. Hello everyone. It's great to be with you today. I'm going to talk about a little bit about partnerships and partnerships in homegrown school feeding in particular. There are three pieces of partnerships that I want to talk about and the first one is that partnerships can help to mobilize resources for successful program implementation. This slide is taken directly from the homegrown school feeding resource framework. If you can see at the top of the slide in the lighter green, it talks about school feeding and benefits to children households and governments. If you add smallholder farmers and homegrown to your school feeding program, you see at the bottom of the slide that you expand the number of actors that are benefiting from homegrown school feeding. Arlene, can you please share the screens please because we can't see the screen. Can you please click on share so we can so we can also visualize the screens. Yes, I'm sorry. Just a moment. Thank you. Yeah. You can see it, but I can't. So just give me one sec here. There we go. Yes, perfect. And slide show. Yes. From beginning. There we go. Sorry. Okay. So we see at the top of the slide, as I mentioned, just just children households and governments are the key beneficiaries when you implement a school meal program. But when you add farmers in and turn the program into a homegrown school feeding program, you reach an additional set of beneficiaries. Another slide shows on the right hand side shows very clearly the types of benefits that come to each of those players in the homegrown school feeding program. The third slide from the homegrown school feeding resource framework shows how the benefits could go both ways. It isn't just the, the, the children and the, and the government and the farmers benefiting for example, it, it, it benefits the program as well. The third slide is a, is a pictograph of bringing all of these stakeholders together sustainably. And this is where the real potential starts to pull together in any given country and any given homegrown school meal program. You can start to identify these stakeholders that can be important to your program. You can help to bring resources into the program who can help to bring technical expertise into the program. And as you can see, you can reach from the core beneficiaries, the core of the program is to help students and their families, but you can start to build your, your program to include all of these players, or all of those players in this pictograph that are, are important to your program to, to both identify resources and also to, to find benefits for them and for the program. So we encourage people to, to consider all of these types of players as relevant to your country. And as relevant to your program, and think about these different layers of input and benefits that can come from your program to establish to start to build the kinds of partnerships that will link to sustainability. So the first pillar of partnerships, I think is this mobilizing resources for mutual benefit. The second pillar is program sustainability, which is a major issue for all development programs. Some characteristics of sustainable programs include things like clear goals and transparent targeting political will find a financial base, particularly we find that having as as how they do mentioned, having a budget, the ring of grants for home grown school feeding is extremely important, but highlighted here is the number of partners that you engage in the program, and as relevant to your program and as the program develops. Meaningful win win involvement of those stakeholders is really important to the sustainability of your program. Some examples of some sustained school meal programs around the world are, they're just numerous, but almost all of these are home grown in some sense of the word. We have them preceded the terminology that we now use of home grown, but where farmers have been involved, local farmers building the local agricultural support for your program, as well as, as ensuring good nutrition for the for children. So each one of these programs, and we've been studying all large scale programs in the world. We've just conducted a survey of the 85 85 countries with large scale programs. And we can see in each one of those that has sustained over a period of time that it has involved a unique set of partnerships that evolve from from the outset of the program to to the long term partnerships to keep the program going. And each one of these countries has its unique set of partnerships that have helped in some way of keeping the program going and all of them involve local purchase in in one form or another. The last part of that I want to mention about partnerships is that I believe that it helps to establish long term friendships it's personally rewarding. And I say that because as I was thinking about this presentation. I was thinking about when did I meet how to do salad. Well, it was over 20 years ago. Leslie Drake, 20 years ago, floor us I've known you for a long time Carmen the same thing, and then working on the homegrown school feeding framework together. We got to bring together the collective wisdom, political commitment, technical expertise of all of these players and it was extremely exciting process it was difficult at times for partnerships are difficult. We had a few arguments here and there, but overall, we had a very successful partnership that continues through today. The last thing that I wanted to leave you with is a a an activity that GCNF has been managing for 22 years this year is the 22nd year, which is the Global Child Nutrition Forum. And this is a chance for anyone in the world to to join with other school feeding players and stakeholders, learn more about school feeding particularly homegrown school feeding, share their strengths, learn from one another, etc. This year, the Global Child Nutrition Forum will be virtual. We won't be able to meet together, but we welcome you all it starts on October 26 so next next week. We can attend for free just go to GCNF 2020.org or go to our website GCNF.org and learn more about the forum and we would love to see you there. We'll talk more about homegrown school feeding at that point. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Alain for underlying the importance of collaboration to generate quality outcomes and also a greater impact. Thank you. I would like now to give the floor to Leslie Drake, who is the executive director of the partnership for child development in the Imperial College of London. Leslie, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you, Christina. Can you hear me? Yes. Excellent. So I come into this conversation, finding that I'm singing to the whole hymn sheet. Everyone seems to think that homegrown school feeding is the bees and the ease we're all partners together, everything moving forward. What you've asked me to talk to you about today is about operate, putting things into operations. How do we take all of this technical theoretical piece and make it happen in the countries. And I think that's really happening. And as Alain was saying, it's happening because we're in partnerships together. And the key thing that we've been working on for several years is working with the governments to look at what they want to do. And how do we bring the technical piece into that. And if you look at the, the piece that you want to talk from me about is the menu planner. The menu planner is something that Imperial College brings to the table in terms of bringing the evidence base to policy decision making and grammatic decision making. And if you, I've just done some quick calculations and I see that over 20 million kids have now benefit benefited from the school meals planner in Sub-Saharan Africa just because we're looking at what's local. How do we connect with the small holder farmers? How do we connect with the teachers? How do we communicate with parents? How do we communicate with pupils? What we're finding is that we have this menu planner, which, which shows what the, if we look at UN decisions about 30% RDA for a school lunch and how, how we can use that from local produce differs across countries, but the framework is solid. And they like it because it's solid and it's from the WFP and the FAO. Now, if you look at what's, what's going on here, you see that it's not just about menu planning in terms of small holder farmers knowing what produce they need. It's about trying to operationalize that. And for example, what do I, what do I understand for 100 kilograms of rice? What does that mean? But if you put it in a handy measure, for example, it means this bucket that you can buy down the market in downtown Nigeria, this is what's going to feed X number of kids. So the small holder, small holder farmers, the cooks, everyone understands the chain. And so if we have menus from Monday to Friday, and we're look, we're using all of the we're looking to provide evidence to the governments to why they should be looking at this. Why should it be domestically financed? What are the impacts on, on education, health and nutrition if you feed children in schools? Is it getting the kids back into schools, not just the females but the males? And are they learning better? The evidence is yes, they are. And this is how we can do this locally. This is how we can promote rural economies. This is how we can get the small holder farmers to get their kids back into school. And so one of the things that we've been working on from our side is in terms of building the, building this into operations. So let's take it from, you know, here's a nice theory, here's a nice model, here's a nice construct. What does that mean on the ground? And so what I'm seeing, as I say, there's, you know, there's millions of kids now benefiting from the studies. And it's not perfect, but it's about, you know, what works contextually. But as Arlene was saying, it's all about context. And so how do we engage with the local governors? How do we engage with the local community services? How do we engage with the parents and the kids? Because one of the important things that I've seen with this menu planner is that it's not just an instruction to the farmers about how much they can get from ex kilos of, it's not about teachers knowing what the menus look like from Monday to Friday. It's actually about the kids taking this on. And they're saying, oh, mom, they're taking this home. They're saying, I'm not getting enough of this gingerbread piece of my menu, of my daily nutrition benefit. And then the parents coming back to the parent, to the education committee saying, okay, there's something here, we need to work on this. How do we do this? And so I think it's not just about the evidence. It's about the operate. How do we operationalize this? And I think that's what the success that we've seen in terms of it, it's not perfect. But in terms of what we're doing in Sub-Saharan Africa, we're actually reaching kids and they get in a daily meal that's nutritionally balanced. And using local foods, whichever key thing. So I could harp on about this forever. But I think that all of the colleagues before me, we've all been saying the same thing, that there is food out there. And I think we need to be a bit more organized about how we manage it. And this menu planner is one more that we're seeing to be done doing that. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much, Leslie, about the, thank you very much for describing the entire process and the importance of the taking into consideration the context in implementation. I would like now to open the floor to the question and answer session and where basically Fabio will be sharing with us the main questions that were asked by participants. I'd like to take this opportunity to come back to the different links so that here you can see the links that bring you directly to the different versions, language versions of the home grown school feeding course, e-learning course. And also to come back on the idea that now you can get a certification through the digital badge system. So, this is possible, because we, we have added at the end a scenario based competency based final test that allows them to earn this digital badge, which is just a certificate of completion. It is a certificate of acquisition of competencies. So this, it has, and it can then follow you as part of your professional profile, it can follow you in your LinkedIn, in your e-portfolio, in your CV. It really certifies the pool of competencies that you have acquired. We have also added here on the screen a number of other nutrition related courses that could be of interest, and this will also be shared with you and will be available on the FAE e-learning academy. I would like now to ask Fabio to maybe share with us some of the questions that were posed by participants and see who of you is willing to respond. Fabio, can you please share some of the questions? Sure. So, Cristina, I would like to share a question that was addressed by our colleague, Pilar Santacoloma, to Carmen. So the question is, SWFP followed impact evaluation on changes in children, nutrition, all status and producer income level. If so, you could shortly describe what has been the result so far. What is the timeframe to reach substantial changes in the two indicators? That's the question. You can also see it in case directly from the Q&A box. So, Carmen, if you want to have a look, it's there. Yep. Thank you so much for that question. And I should say that we have a number of impact evaluations that were done actually with the partners here on the call, especially PCD and GCNF and others. The evaluation's done of the programs in Ghana, done of the program in Kenya. I believe we also have another really interesting one of the program in Mali and others. And as we move forward, we're going to be looking at doing a meta analysis of all of these impact evaluations to see how and what we can claim. What's telling us are the benefits of these programs in aggregate now that we have quite a body of research that has been put forward. So let me tell you that the evidence is telling us quite conclusively that these programs have impacts on education dimensions. There's no discussion anymore about the impact of homegirls school feeding on enrollment attendance, reducing dropout, and having a specific benefit for girls. And these are girls of all ages, but also as we move forward in the knowledge base, we're also detecting a specific benefit for adolescent girls as well. The fortification dimension has been fairly well studied. There's also really good evidence that these programs have nutritional benefits and here through two major pathways. One is by providing them with the more nutritious foods, especially if foods are fortified or bio fortified or combined with fortification or supplementation. And we have this documented as well with a specific focus again on girls. So you can see a gender narrative here forming these. These are programs that are very, very good for gender equality and they're very gender sensitive if they're designed correctly. But also, we're starting to see in more middle income countries and this is an area where research still needs to be done. But we're starting to see some evidence that these programs have benefits on dietary habits of children and the potential benefit around overweight and obesity and malnutrition issues particularly in middle income countries but more and more and low income countries. And here the benefits of homegrown school feeding with the introduction of fresh produce of products that are produced locally is a really important factor, not just to influence what kids eat at in the school, but also their habits, and what they take with them later in life so there's, there's evidence but so we need to continue to build that knowledge there but I would say that's a really promising aspect. And of course, all of the, the homegrown aspect that we've been discussing the impact on small holder farmers the impact of local economies the impact on on women's employment. And I think it's really important to notice that when we started this idea of homegrown school feeding, we focused mainly on the impact that they would have on farmers and their incomes. But as we have moved forward and studying the practice, we've realized that the benefits range in the supply chain from production to processing to trading to the logistics networks, caterers, etc. So, there are benefits around employment income and other things that have been documented. Specifically in these impact evaluations that I've been talking about in Ghana and Kenya Mali there's PCT has done interesting work in Nigeria as well so that's a little bit of the summary of some of the things that we know so far. Thank you so much Carmen it was a very comprehensive answer. We have two more minutes, so perhaps we can answer to one more question which is a bit more open. It's from Rafael Danolfo and the question is the following. Are the farming systems adopted by small holders important when talking about homegrown school feeding. The ecological farming systems can represent an alternative approach to boost the diversity of production with a special emphasis on local crops. So this is for any of you can take this question as it's not indicated for who's the question. Okay, so I can give you some examples there. In Nigeria, the forward contracting system has led to the accessibility of the markets in a sustainable way to small holder farmers. So they have the small holder farmer market now for school feeding. What that has led to is they are now enabled to look at new markets. And so I know that the farmers in in Nigeria in a particular state or shun state. And now that the lead suppliers for chicken for Kentucky fried chicken across Africa. This started with Sub-Saharan Africa. This started with school feeding. And so here's a stable forward contracting market where you know where the money is coming from. You can you can sign your name. There's nothing on on on the it's not a corrupted chain. So now they're exploring that and they're working on it. The same is true in Mali. And if you look at Mali, Mali had a coup d'etat. And the school the school feeding actually survived the coup d'etat, but it did it in a way that they made it themselves. So when we were talking about context means everything. It's just, what can we as technical people engage with governments to act when they want our help to actually give them the evidence to make it work in their context. So it's working in Mali is working in Kenya is working in Nigeria is working in Madagascar is working in several Ethiopia is working all over the place but it's all context driven. And my opinion on this is that we need as technical scientific people to be able to give the evidence and allow the politicians and the policymakers and the program implementers. Use that information to work it make it work for them. Okay, thanks a lot for your answer. Since we reached the conclusion of this webinar, let me also remind you that the Q&A comprehensive with all the answers to the questions that have been entered in the box will be provided in the comments that will be shared in the link that I'm now writing into the chat. So I will give the floor again to Christina or for closing. Thank you. Thank you. So I would like to all the speakers for the excellent presentations. I would like to also thank all our partners who have made this this webinar possible so also a Greenham and UNS cap Fabio Pichinich and Bucharest for for all the logistics and all of you the participants. Thank you very, very much. All the information related to the webinar, the recordings, the PowerPoints, the question and answer will be available through the FAE Learning Academy on the webinar section. And we look forward to having you with us in our next webinar next Wednesday. Thank you all very, very much. Bye bye. Thank you so much to all of you. Thank you speakers. It was a pleasure.