In the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, Gawad Kalinga (GK), through financial support from various private donors, piloted a large-scale anti-hunger program called Kusina ng Kalinga (KnK) by establishing the first central kitchen in Alang-Alang, Leyte in March 2014. The initial success of this program in providing daily lunch meals to 3,000 public elementary students prompted the discussions for continuation and replication for another school year.
In June 2015, GK and Life Bank Foundation entered into a partnership to replicate the KnK model to address hunger and malnutrition for 4,000 public school students in Alang-Alang, Leyte and Nagcarlan, Laguna.
In the midst of this joint effort to address hunger among children, key events have again brought to fore the depth and urgency of the problem and the pressing need to come up with effective solutions. Foremost of these events is the onslaught of El Niño which negatively affected 32 of the 81 provinces in the country. The violent incident in Kidapawan painfully captured the possible escalation and further complications of this already difficult problem. There is mounting urgency to come up with immediate and lasting responses to the problem of hunger.
Presently, there are now 12 KnK central kitchens across the Philippines that provide nutritious lunches to all school children daily for the entire schoolyear.
The KnK program has two main goals: (1) Strengthen and promote a model for large-scale universal feeding that will ease hunger for children in school and on the streets; (2) Use the effective implementation of this model to influence local and national legislation and policy for anti-hunger programs for children in and out of school.
The KnK Program reaches an average of 18,252 kids in school and on the streets every school day. This directly translates to punctuating the vicious cycle of sustained involuntary hunger among these kids. At the very least, these kids are spared from going through the day without a meal. For those whose families are able to provide some meals, the KnK lunch serves as a necessary supplement to complete the quantity and quality of their daily food intake. The impact of these daily meals can be assessed through three distinct but related metrics:
a. Change in nutritional status
b. Change in weight
c. Improvement in nutritional value of meals
After a year of operation, the combined severe malnourishment and malnourishment rate has dropped from 21% to 9%. This significant drop places the schools covered by KnK way below the national malnutrition average of 30%.2 These metrics are indicative of the positive effect of the program on the nutritional status of the kids and point to an opportunity to pursue an end to sustained hunger and malnutrition. However, additional elements such as prevailing medical condition and food intake at home must be factored in to come up with more definitive approaches to obliterate malnutrition and hunger among these kids.
Kusina ng Kalinga in Happy Hallow Elementary School, Baguio City is a partnership with Noble Trends Unbound Foundation. It is the 4th kitchen established in Luzon and the pilot for replication in the Cordillera Administrative Region.