Annual Country Report 2021: Benin. Country Strategic Plan 2019-2023

Annual Country Report 2021: Benin. Country Strategic Plan 2019-2023

Rome (Italy): World Food Programme, 2021.

English

50 p.

ELR1582

Benin is one of the flagship countries in West Africa when it comes to school feeding. The government of Benin has committed to establishing a sustainable national school meals programme, and thanks to WFP's strong partnership with the Government and the programme's broad coverage, 717,206 children received a nutritious and healthy meal every school day, with the dual aim of promoting school attendance, and providing food security to vulnerable households. WFP is supporting the Government of Benin in its institutional capacity building, through the development of law in favour of school feeding, and technical capacity to ensure a gradual handover for the implementation of the programme. WFP is in the process of including an additional 1,729 schools in the programme by the end of April 2022. Over the past year, WFP's monitoring outcomes show an improvement in the school drop-out rate, decreasing from 15.5 to 12.5 percent (yet remains 2.5 percent above target); retention rates also improved from 84.5 to 87.5 percent between 2020 and 2021 (slightly lower than the target, by 0.9 percent). WFP is also working on the development of a national model for school feeding, which is being tested in pilot schools. This model is the keystone of WFP’s handover roadmap, to support the transition from a WFP-led school feeding programme to a government-led school feeding programme. To help strengthen data collection and analysis for evidence generation, WFP is providing valuable inputs to the national food security analysis and Cadre Harmonisé exercise, with the aim of improving the capacity of national and local institutions. Currently, WFP is conducting a comprehensive food security and vulnerability analysis, in collaboration with the National Institute of Statistics, funded by the Kingdom of the Netherlands. To respond to the Government's appeal for humanitarian assistance following the flooding disaster in late 2019, WFP introduced a Strategic Outcome focused on crisis response into its programmatic framework. The country office utilized cash-based transfers as a modality for the first time in 2021, transferring over USD 200,000 through mobile money transfers.

ELR 1582

eng

MON-127198

127198