The HGSFP is set to help small holder farmers become more self-sufficient, increase household income while enriching school meals with nutritious fresh foods.

Bai Mankay Sankoh, Country Director: World Food Programme (left), and Dr Tjama Tjivikua, NUST Vice-Chancellor.The HGSFP is aligned to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, which aims to end all forms of hunger and malnutrition by 2030. According to statistics, every school day about 330 000 pre-primary and primary school learners in 1 400 schools across the country are fed by the MoEAC. School feeding programmes are aimed at improving the nutritional health status of children, including cognitive development.

Through the Agreement, NUST will provide support in designing and drafting the programme together with a multi-sectoral design team. This team is composed of representatives of the WFP, the MoEAC, the Ministry of Agriculture Water and Forestry, the Ministry of Industrialisation and SME Development, and Ministry of Environment and Tourism, and the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations.

The NUST team will be led by Dr Hylton Villet, Director of the Harold Pupkewitz Business School, with support of staff from the Faculty of Natural Resources and Spatial Sciences, Faculty of Health and Applied Sciences and the Namibia-German Institute of Logistics. The NUST Projects Services Unit will facilitate the collaboration to ensure the project outcomes and deliverables.

The Partnership Agreement and its respective addendum, was signed by the WFP Country Director, Bai Mankay Sankoh, and the NUST Vice-Chancellor, Dr Tjama Tjivikua.

“This collaboration complements the capacity building for the sustainable development notion which is critical for the WFP,” remarked Sankoh. The Partnership Agreement facilitates collaboration focused on the provision of evidence-based policy and strategic support to the development agenda of the Republic of Namibia.

The Vice-Chancellor echoed with similar sentiments indicating that: “NUST strongly believes in a bottom-up involvement to ensure that communities at the grass-roots level are involved in shaping their own food security in the future.”