May 3, 2010

DARA has been commissioned by the World Food Programme (WFP) to carry out an impact evaluation of the national school feeding programme in Cambodia. Currently, the programme is designed to benefit more than half a million of children in Cambodia’s most vulnerable areas. Through the school feeding programme, children are provided an early daily meal, and girls and vulnerable children are provided the so-called take rations once a month – also known as conditional food transfers.

The purpose of the school feeding programme is to incentivize parents to enroll their children in primary education. Once in school, it is believed that school feeding will boost children’s learning processes on the assumption that a daily meal will alleviate short-term hunger and hence the children’s ability to concentrate and learn.

The aim of this evaluation is to measure the impact school feeding has on children’s schooling, how it may affect or contribute to an improvement of school-age children’s nutritional status and the significance the conditional food transfers has on poor and vulnerable households.

The evaluation will apply up-to-date methodological tools and mixed-method approaches, combining large household survey, with analysis of secondary data and participatory assessment techniques.

The evaluation runs from May to October 2010. DARA carried out a similar evaluation of WFP intervention in Mozambique in 2009.