World Food Programme

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Thematic Focus
• Strategy
• Achievements

Overview

The World Food Programme (WFP) is the United Nations' frontline agency in the fight against hunger. It responds to emergencies, saving lives by getting food to the hungry fast, and it also works to help prevent hunger in the future.

Canada, through CIDA, was the second-largest single country donor to WFP in 2010, providing a total of $285 million. Canada's donation helped WFP feed more than 109.2 million people in 75 countries.

Canada is a key member of WFP's Executive Board and has been instrumental in enhancing WFP's commitment to equality between women and men, results-based management, and emergency assessments. During its time as president of the WFP Executive Board from February 2007 to February 2008, Canada introduced a reform agenda proposing a number of initiatives to strengthen WFP's audit and oversight mechanisms.

In April 2008, in an effort to strengthen the effectiveness of its aid, Canada opened 100 percent of its food aid budget to international procurement with a special emphasis on developing countries. Not only does untied food assistance provide WFP with increased flexibility to purchase locally, which helps to get the food to those that need it as quickly as possible, it also ensures the food is culturally appropriate and helps to develop local and regional markets.

Thematic Focus

WFP's mandate is closely aligned with CIDA's priority themes of increasing food security and securing the future of children and youth. In 2011, WFP expects to meet the needs of 90 million people in 73 countries.

Food security

WFP is the only United Nations and multilateral organization providing food assistance on a global scale. It is CIDA's main partner in preventing acute hunger and reducing chronic hunger around the world. CIDA's food security strategy (271 KB, 9 pages) prioritizes CIDA's work with WFP to encourage flexible, predictable funding from donors and support nutrition interventions.

Children and youth

CIDA's children and youth strategy (252.55 KB, 8 pages) focuses on reducing child mortality and increasing access to primary education, both of which can be addressed through school feeding programs. WFP is the world's largest provider of school meals. Getting meals in school helps hungry children learn, motivates children to stay in school, and can provide an incentive for girls to attend school―sometimes helping to reduce gender disparities in enrolment levels.

CIDA's Strategy for Working with WFP

CIDA's work with WFP focuses on six strategic objectives:

1. 1. Strengthening the effectiveness of WFP's existing food assistance programming. This includes:
   • Helping to improve WFP's operations in complex humanitarian situations and natural disasters
   • Encouraging WFP to continue to coordinate with other relevant organizations and to provide leadership by sharing guidelines, reporting on results achieved, and developing lessons learned
2. Supporting WFP's new innovative programs that target beneficiary gaps and help ensure that food assistance is meeting the needs of vulnerable populations. This includes:
   • Pilot programs in Ghana and Afghanistan that will create and enhance markets for food commodities grown locally by low-income or small-scale farmers, the majority of whom are women, and improve long-term food security
3. Supporting WFP's focus on integrating improved nutrition into its programming in order to maximize the benefits of food assistance and improve health outcomes in emergencies, which also fits into CIDA's focus on improving maternal and child health
4. Strengthening the effectiveness of WFP's school feeding program intended to ensure that no child goes to school hungry by 2015. This includes:
   • Contributing to the development and implementation of a new WFP policy for school feeding
   • Advocating for an independent evaluation of this policy, including results, within two years to ensure its effectiveness
5. Supporting flexible, predictable funding for WFP to meet the needs of hungry people. This includes:
   • Helping to reform WFP's financial structure to increase its transparency and accountability to donors.
6. Supporting the continued improvement and enhancement of WFP's management, accountability and oversight functions, its ability to report on results, and the implementation of its gender equality action plan

Achievements

In 2010, with the support of CIDA and other donors, WFP:

• Reached 109.2 million people in 75 countries with 4.6 million metric tonnes of food
• Reached the second highest number of beneficiaries ever (after 113 million people reached in 2004)
• Reached 3.7 million vulnerable children with nutritionally enriched food and micronutrient powders
• Provided 21.1 million school children with school meals and/or take home rations, contributing to increasing enrolment rates by 83 percent and the ratio of boys and girls attending school to 90 percent
• Procured 150,000 metric tonnes of food through its Purchase for Progress (P4P) initiative, saving US$23 million when compared to the cost of procuring the food internationally, increasing P4P purchases by 5 percent and providing benefits to local farmers and economies
• Provided food to 7 million beneficiaries in response to the floods in Pakistan and was responsible for flying close to 3,500 missions transporting more than 12,200 metric tonnes of food and other emergency humanitarian goods for almost 20 different organizations, providing supplies to an estimated one million people who were inaccessible other than by air at the height of the crisis
• Delivered food to 4.3 million people in response to the earthquake in Haiti, resulting in the proportion of food secure people increasing from 48 percent in February 2010 to 61 percent in June 2010, and reached 993,000 students to support their return to school, with CIDA's substantial support to school feeding
• Provided food assistance to 5.3 million beneficiaries and increased its food distribution from an average of 3,000 metric tonnes to 40,000 metric tonnes in a month in response to the drought in Niger
• Provided food for 1.5 million returnees in the south, ahead of the January 2011 referendum on independence for Southern Sudan
• Used targeted supplementary feeding to reduce malnutrition among pregnant and lactating women and children under 5 in Ghana, resulting in stunting levels declining from 26 percent in 2009 to 22 percent in 2010, indicating that mothers were using the knowledge they had acquired about feeding

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