Maximizing the Number of Children Helped

This section describes the goals and methods for deploying funds raised to maximize the reduction in the number of children not in school due to hunger or extreme poverty.

Long-term Roadmap

There are many areas in need of improvement with regard to education, such as the availability to qualified teachers, facilities and education resources in various parts, especially poorer parts of the world. Our long-term Roadmap includes the following:
  1. Achieving a state where no child is out of school due to hunger or extreme poverty.
  2. Achieving a state where no child is out of school due to gender.
  3. Achieving a state where 100 percent of children have access to quality education resources.
  4. Achieving a state where 100 percent of children have the mindset and support to acquire a competitive, world-class education regardless of where in the world they live and what family situation they live in.
  5. Achieving a state where children fail to survive to school age due to hunger and similar cuases.

Current Goal: No child out of school due to hunger or poverty

There are many areas in need of improvement with regard to education, such as the availability to qualified teachers, facilities and education resources in various parts, especially poorer parts of the world.

As the above roadmap shows, we plan to address all of these in the future, however the focus of this aspect of this project is very clear, achieve a point where there is no child out of school due to hunger or extreme poverty.

To that end, this phase of the current initiative is focused on getting every child in the world in school with adequate nourishment to ensure that they are able to concentrate and learn.

Scope of the problem

According to the UN, there are between 55 and 60 million children of primary school age out of school. Many due to hunger and extreme poverty.

A simple solution

Ensuring every child has access to a nutritious meal in a place of learning every school day. This is very simple.

The Process:

An Oversight Committee will be established with representatives of major stakeholders to administer and oversee that part of the project that is concerned with providing food in places of learning for the greatest number of children that would otherwise not be in school or have adequate nutrition to be able to learn effectively.

1. Request for Proposals

The first step is to issue a Request for Proposals for effectively and efficiently providing a nutritious meal in a place of learning every day to the greatest number of the world’s poorest children with the goal of eliminating the case of children not being in school or not being able to learn due to hunger.

2. Project Prioritization

A Prioritization Committee will review proposals and prioritize them based on:
  • Scope of impact
  • Cost efficiency
  • NGO history of reliability
  • Availability of matching funds, etc.
  • Etc.
They will then authorize the projects in the sequence of priority and availability of funds.

3. Delivery & Quality Assurance

Selected NGOs will execute their proposal plans and will provide the Oversight Committee with agreed upon periodic progress reports.

The Oversight Committee will arrange additional quality assurance measures to ensure compliance with the approved proposal plans.

Mary's Meals: One NGO Example:

Mary’s Meals is one example of an NGO that specializes in providing the world’s poorest children with a nutritious meal a day in a place of learning. Currently Mary’s Meals provides more than a million meals to such children every school day. (This is not an endorsement of Mary’s Meals as the best NGO in this area, but simple using them as an example of an effective charitable organization feeding poor children in schools.)

Scope of the problem

One solution

A million children every day!

Other Considerations:

Expanding Services to new Areas

This initiative hopes to dramatically reduce the number of children in the world not in school due to hunger-related causes. Given that this calls for a significant increase inthe number of meals provided daily as well as the expansion of programs into areas where they have not yet existed and for which local infrastructure may not yet be present this can add to the number of challenges needing to be overcome to ensure effective and efficient achievement of the program goals.

Challenges may be in gaining the support of local leaders or in organizing local volunteers to keep costs down.

It is expected that tens of thousands of Rotary-affiliated clubs will be supporting this initiative. Many of these will be in areas near cases where there are many children in need of nutrition to be able to attend school of improve learning. Rotarians could be able in several ways:

  • identifying areas with large numbers of children in need of nutritional suppport
  • winning the support of local community and other leaders for the program
  • helping to recruit, train and support local volunteers in cooperation with the program
  • reporting on local program progress, effectiveness and efficiency

Parallel Supporting Initiatives

While the current phase of this initiative is focused primarily on ensuring all children are in school and have the basic nutritional prerequisites to be able to learn effectively, there are many other problems that limit learning effectiveness. These include:
  • availability of qualified teachers or equivalent
  • availability of effective learning resources (e.g. books in a local language)
  • availability of facilities (e.g. a building or room suitable for learning)
  • Availability of facilitating infrastructure (e.g. Internet connectivity or even just electricity)
The momentum created by this initiative could create opportunities for many other initiatives to address some of these related needs.