'Feeding program covers 43% of malnourished kids'

Only 43 percent of undernourished children aged two to four are covered by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD)'s supplemental feeding program, the Second Congressional Commission on Education said.

- By BELLA CARIASO

EDCOM 2 executive director Karol Mark Yee reported that the DSWD school feeding program covers only about 159,000 children of the 373,000 children suffering from wasting in that age group.

He said that this suggests that roughly 213,000 children are still unable to receive the intervention.

EDCOM 2 emphasized that this severe lack of coverage is largely attributable to logistical and structural failures since the school feeding program is a facility-based intervention.

The program fails to reach the bulk of children who have low participation in early childhood programs or who are not enrolled in daycare centers.

The World Health Organization defines child wasting as a child too thin for his or her height and is the result of recent rapid weight loss or the failure to gain weight.