World Food Day, celebrated annually on October 16, is one of the most significant observances on the UN calendar. This day aims to raise awareness about global food challenges and to inspire action toward ensuring nutritious food for all.
Despite the significant progress in food security over the past three decades, UNICEF’s 2024 Child Nutrition Report highlights a stark reality: “Globally, one in four children (27%) are living in severe child food poverty in early childhood, amounting to 181 million children under 5 years of age.” The report identifies the major drivers of severe child food poverty, which “persist because the food, health and social protection systems are failing to improve physical and financial access to affordable, nutritious and diverse foods … And these systems are ill-equipped to cope with the global and local impacts of conflict, climatic shocks and economic crises.”
“Philanthropy has an important role in raising awareness about the conditions facing children and families around the world and helping to assure public resources are available to support the basic needs, particularly nutrition support in the early years of life.”
– Joan Lombardi, international expert in early childhood development and family policy, and Advisor to GEF
This year, the Bainum Family Foundation is commemorating World Food Day by joining our global partners in raising awareness about the need for public resources that ensure access to nutritious foods in community-based settings. These are vital spaces where children must receive the essential support necessary for their healthy development and overall well-being. Through the Global Education Fund (GEF), our Family Philanthropy team has heard from partners and early childhood organizations about the overwhelming need for public financing to ensure a stable supply of food for children in early childhood programs — where they spend a significant amount of their time during a key developmental phase.
Providing quality food in these settings presents a vital opportunity to address early nutrition, yet it remains largely neglected by governments. Currently, government funding is typically geared toward school nutrition programs, but it must be expanded to include the early years of childhood. This piece from the Center for Global Development sums up the much more common “health-centric response to under-nutrition” and explains why this ongoing, severely underfunded issue has been so difficult to solve.
As we uplift World Food Day, we’re excited to spotlight the incredible work some grantee partners are doing to integrate quality nutrition into their early childhood programs. Each of these projects is receiving a multi-year grant from GEF, enhancing the health and well-being of young children within their communities across the world.
Catholic Relief Services (Grant location: Lesotho)
International humanitarian NGO, Catholic Relief Services (CRS), is improving the quality of care at child care centers in industrial areas of Lesotho. CRS, in collaboration with Lesotho’s Ministry of Agriculture, Food Security and Nutrition, trains child care center providers on food preparation techniques, responsive feeding, and the construction of climate-smart modern gardens producing diversified vegetables to supplement the meals that are cooked onsite. In addition, CRS collaborated with various government ministries (including the Ministry of Education and Training) and other NGOs to develop a feeding menu that is adopted in child care centers — ensuring improved feeding practices and intake of nutritious meals daily. CRS trains child care providers and parents on child nutrition and food preservation and conducts cooking demonstrations. Furthermore, CRS engaged in negotiations with the Ministry of Education and Training to extend the school feeding program support in the project implementation areas to the participating child care centers, which are now receiving tinned fish, cooking oil, peas, beans, and maize meals every quarter.
iACT (Grant location: Darfuri refugee camps in eastern Chad)
iACT is an international humanitarian nonprofit dedicated to a new model of humanitarian action through co-created and community-led sports and preschool programs. This includes a home-based preschool program called “Little Ripples,” which iACT co-designed with refugees who are from the Darfur region of western Sudan and have been living in eastern Chad. Each preschool is hosted in the home of a refugee family, with a structure constructed in the family’s yard. At each of the preschool centers, a pair of cooks — typically one of the host family members and a neighbor — are hired to help prepare a daily, nutritious meal for students. Families of students tell iACT how important the meal component of Little Ripples is, because it provides one of two daily meals that the children receive, largely due to the scarcity of rations provided by the World Food Program.
OneSky (Grant location: Vietnam)
The international NGO OneSky for all children developed a training system for independent child care providers who care for children of migrant factory workers in Vietnam’s industrial zones. Now part of Vietnam’s national curriculum for early childhood care and development, OneSky’s program features training sessions developed in collaboration with the SPOON Foundation. These sessions focus on balanced nutrition and feeding techniques, including strategies for children with special needs. OneSky recognizes nutrition as an essential part of nurturing the mental and physical development of our youngest children and delivers these training sessions on nutrition and feeding to child care providers so they are better equipped to support child development more holistically.
PATH (Grant location: Ghana)
PATH is a global nonprofit that works to accelerate health equity in more than 70 countries. In Ghana, PATH is designing and piloting a model in two districts of the capital city, Accra, that demonstrates how child care programs can be used to promote more comprehensive, nurturing care by strengthening linkages between the programs and governmental primary health care and nutrition services. Additionally, PATH will support child care centers in developing their own nutrition guidelines aligned with Ghana’s Nutrition-Friendly School Initiative. It will include:
- Better use of family monetary contributions for procuring and preparing nutritious meals
- Parent and child education about consumption of healthy snacks and foodstuffs
- Monitoring the sale of fizzy drinks and unhealthy food items outside of child care centers.
While the foundation’s primary focus is on Early Childhood within the United States, we continue to honor the interests and intentions of our founders through various Legacy Programs, including our Family Philanthropy (FP) work. Within FP, one notable effort is the Global Education Fund, which was established by a member of the Bainum family. This fund provides grants aimed at enhancing access to high-quality early care and education for young children worldwide.
