Have you got the lesson?

A school in Piura highlands celebrates learning achievements, but what about the rest of the region?

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Photo by Qali Warma.

HUANCABAMBA, Peru - As FACTORTIERRA told it, one of the successful cases inside Piura Region about  a school optimizing a feeding government programme is 14408 Virgen de las Mercedes, which parents and teachers incorporated a plan of hygiene good practices and solid residue management.  But, what about achievements in learning terms?

According to Qali Warma Programme, only in reading comprehension, the progress is almost 30% during the last three years. In 2014, 54.3% of evaluated 2nd-grade students understood the texts they red. Now in 2017, from 73 evaluated 2nd-grade students, 60 (82.2%) understand what they read. Additionally, 51 students (69.9%) are capable to reason and to use strategies for solving Maths problems.

FACTORTIERRA contacted local Education authorities  to obtain annual statistics, so analyzing advances  in detail but  and answer was not sent to us.  However, an official assured the progress is notavle along the jurisdiction and Qali Warma shared us the following table:

 

Those graphics belong to achievement in 2^nd grade.

 

Those graphics belong to achievements in 4^th grade.

 

The results were gotten during the last Students Census evaluation (ECE as in Spanish), those Qali Warma attributes to the nutritional quality improving, what we could not verify independently.

According to school's principal Tomasa Gómez de Adrianzén, "the kids listen to the classes with more atention, are much awaken, they are only worried about catching what teachers teach." She adds  they apparently have become more productive because one of their tasks consists in reaching better scores.

Only at this school, Qali Warma provides breakfast and lunch to 459 children, 364 in elementary and 95 in kindergarten. Across Piura Region, the program covers 281,668 children at 4067 public kindergarten and elementary schools. Additionally, Peruvian Government and regional governments , like Piura, have launched programmes to fight child anemia and malnutrition, especially in 6-month-old to 3-year-old children.

The medical premise sustains that during that lapse of life, the brain bases its development so if it is not fed adequately could impact in a negative manner on the physiology of teaching-learning process.

Quoting results of National Institute for Statistics and Informatics' National Demographic Survey on Health (2015), La República newspaper affirmed that "almost 36%  of 6-month-old to 36-month-old children got anemia and 20.3% of under-5-year-old children got chronic malnutrition," in other words, about 37,000 kids or the equivalent to 0.2% of Piura population (estimated 1.85 million). In Huancabamba Province, the Ministry of Health found 40.9% got chronic malnutrition in 2015.

Across Piura, it might say that anemia and chronic malnutrition are distributed equaly in all provinces, although certain prevalence at the Andes.

Piura's Regional Government has tried to decrease the levels through the free distribution of mycronutrients at health posts, but at the places where they were delivered, the families had not received adequate instructions about how to administer them or they simply did not administer them. In other places, regional officials recognized they were not delivered them to the posts neither.

A low-cost solution suggested by the World Food Programme to fight the child anemia has been incorporating  the chicken's blood and liver into the diet of poorest families. As they are rich in iron (due to hemoglobine), there are favorable results in control of height and weight, La República reported. If the model of Virgen de las Mercedes School has worked, maybe the next step is replying it as much as the existent resources allow it.