ReliefWeb

Highlights

• The Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and WFP signed a three-year agreement to roll out activities that improves food security, nutrition and resilience to climate-related shocks in nine disaster-prone districts of Sri Lanka.

• WFP is monitoring the ongoing drought in Sri Lanka that has affected 216,000 families. The Meteorological Department has expressed its concern that there will be 50 percent less rainfall than expected.

WFP Assistance

The objective of the Country Programme (CP) is to transition towards providing a more holistic support to the Government’s efforts to address hunger and malnutrition and build resilience to climate-related shocks. The CP is implemented in partnership with government ministries, United Nations agencies, nongovernmental organizations and the private sector.

The goals of the CP are to:

• Reduce undernutrition among children under 5 and pregnant and nursing women;

• Increase food intake and school attendance among primary schoolchildren in food-insecure areas; - Enhance vulnerable households’ resilience to shocks and facilitate adaptation to climate change; and

• Increase government capacities to address food and nutrition insecurity.

Through the School Meals Programme, WFP provides nutritious mid-morning meals to 160,000 schoolchildren in the Northern Province, contributing to increased attendance and retention rates and improved learning performance.

WFP supports resilience building against climate shocks through adaptation measures to improve food and nutrition security for the climate shock-affected communities.

WFP also focuses on the treatment of moderate acute malnutrition through targeted supplementary feeding for children aged 6-59 months using Super Cereal Plus, a nutritious corn-soya blend.

Other projects:

Scaling-Up Nutrition through a Multi Sector Approach: WFP and FAO support the Government in implementing its Multi-Sectoral Action Plan on Nutrition, funded by the Spanish Cooperation through the Sustainable Development Goal Fund (SDG-F).

The action plan includes conducting nutrition baseline surveys, promoting food fortification and supporting policy formulation.

WFP provides technical support to the Ministry of Health and Indigenous Medicine to enhance the impact of Thriposha, a nutritious, locally fortified blended food, distributed at health clinics island-wide and under the national supplementary feeding programme.

Scaling-Up Nutrition (SUN) – People’s Forum: WFP supports the Government’s advocacy effort to promote nutrition for the first 1,000 days of a child through partnership with Save the Children and civil societies.

Through the Climate Change Adaptation Project, WFP assists 14,000 farming families in the Mahaweli River Basin through the implementation of adaptation measures such as water harvesting, improved home gardening, alternative livelihoods, etc. The Climate Adaptation Management and Innovation

Initiative (C-ADAPT) aims to enhance food security among vulnerable subsistence lagoon fishermen and women’s groups through improved livelihoods in the least resilient communities.

WFP is supporting the National Strategic Review for Food Security and Nutrition towards Zero Hunger. As part of broader efforts by Sri Lanka to nationalise the new SDGs, this review focusing on SDG 2 is led by the former President Madam Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (1994-2005) as the lead convener, and will be conducted by the South Asia Policy and Research Institute (SAPRI). The findings and recommendations will contribute to the national development action plan of the Government, and will inform key actors on high priority food security and nutrition trends and response gaps.