by Christiane Fischer

16 November 2007

Sud Lípez, Bolivia: I’m working with the World Food Programme (WFP) in Bolivia. I’m specifically involved in the school feeding programme and in a new project called “Generation of capacities aiming at the sustainability of the School Feeding Programme”.

The project is aimed at developing local productive chains, reducing poverty and food insecurity through the promotion of food cultures and breeding of small animals for the School Feeding Programme, fostering in this way the food sovereignty.

For this project I’m visiting schools and communities in the most vulnerable municipalities of Bolivia, talking with local authorities to advocate the project and creating promotional materials. This work enables me to see all the sides of a project aimed at sustainable development, from the administrative to the operative part.

What I find the most interesting is to talk with the people to whom we’re presenting the project, the majority responding with doubts and fears, because so many development projects have either failed or haven’t even begun, leaving many promises in the air. I think that it’s a big challenge to meet people’s expectations and to find and equilibrium between give and take, to reach co-working and capacitating more than paternalism in the development work.

I’m very motivated to learn about the dynamics of sustainability, and I hope that the greenhouses, school gardens, chicken houses, rabbit/guinea pig houses which we’re going to build will last and give much pleasure and satisfaction to the schoolchildren. The important is also that we’re looking to build alliances between the different institutions and the government to strengthen the impact of the project and also to ensure its viability by building bridges between municipalities, NGOs, United Nations agencies, local communities and parents. I’m also very thankful to the people I work with; they teach me a lot of useful skills and ways to understand rural development.

One valuable experience I would like to share is the arrival in a community in Sud Lípez (the very south part of Bolivia, close to the border to Argentina), for me really lost at the end of the world, where all the school children and teachers were taking good care of a little greenhouse and working to construct a bigger one at 4000 meters of altitude, in a very cold and windy environment.

I was very impressed by the dedication of the community and their sense of solidarity for the school children. The school feeding aims at ensuring that children, especially girls, attend school regularly, in a country where the proportion of children who finish primary school until the eighth grade has decreased from 86% in 2004 to 77% in 2005. In rural schools, 44% of the girls finish their primary studies, while for the boys the percentage is 54%. And in the municipalities with the mayor food insecurity, 51% of the girls don’t go to school. That’s why investing in providing food to the pupils can keep children in school, even more so if the food is grown in the very same school.

What is most rewarding in my experience as a UNV intern is that I get to learn many new realities which widen my horizon and which make me more conscious about the issues I want to work in my life.