Supporting Access to Education for Vulnerable Children

This operation expired on 31 March 2016.

Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic with high levels of poverty and widespread unemployment, depends on food imports and remittances. It is vulnerable to external shocks, so the impact of the recent high food and fuel prices and global financial crisis is expected to slow many of the advances Tajikistan has made over the last ten years.

This project supports access to education for primary schoolchildren from the poorest and most vulnerable families by giving them a hot meal every day they are in school. It builds on past successes and partnerships with the Ministry of Education, local authorities and parent-teacher associations. These stakeholders will play an essential role in the hand-over strategy for a sustainable and nationally-owned school feeding programme under the Government.

This is WFP’s first development project in its 17 years in Tajikistan. It supports the goals of the United Nations Development Assistance Framework 2010–2015 and the Government’s National Education Strategy 2006–2015, and is closely aligned with the Government’s National Development Strategy 2007–2015 and Poverty Reduction Strategy 2010–2012, to which the United Nations and WFP contributed. The project addresses WFP’s Strategic Objective 4 – “Reduce chronic hunger and undernutrition”; and Strategic Objective 5 – “Strengthen the capacities of countries to reduce hunger, including through hand-over strategies and local purchase”. It contributes to Millennium Development Goal 1 – “Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger”; Millennium Development Goal 2 – “Achieve universal primary education”, and Millennium Development Goal 3: “Promote gender quality and empower women”.

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Budget revision 7 extends the Tajikistan DEV 200120 by additional 3 months from 1 January through 31 March 2016. The extension is designed to bridge the period from the current project end date (31 December 2015) to the expected start date of the new Country Programme (CP) 2016-2020.