Highlights
- While chronic child malnutrition fell over the last decade, anaemia has experienced an upward trend since 2011, affecting 43 percent of children under three.
- High exposure to recurring disasters threatens the food security of vulnerable populations.
- The new Government aims to reduce chronic child undernutrition from 14% to 6.4%, and to eliminate extreme poverty and child anemia by 2021.
WFP Assistance
Under its PROSAN initiative, WFP seeks to improve the food security of 23,000 vulnerable people in Sechura, where the lack of government health services and economic opportunities, particularly for women, contributes to above average rates of chronic child malnutrition and anaemia. WFP aims to strengthen government capacity and, principally female-led community nutrition programmes, address micronutrient deficiencies, support smallholder farmers market access and develop emergency response capacity.
With its Japan funded LCD project, WFP’s objective is to help authorities coordinate and strengthen their humanitarian logistics response capacity, focusing on needs assessment, transport, warehousing and distribution, integrating gender and cultural considerations.
Under the EU funded interagency DIPECHO project, WFP’s goal is to strengthen authorities’ emergency response capacity and coordination by identifying disaster risks and vulnerable populations, developing gender sensitive methods to measure emergency response capacity, improving emergency food assistance guidelines and supporting INDECI's training programme.
Building on the reduction of anaemia achieved during the 2011-2015 project, this new nutritional education initiative targets a larger geographic area to support government efforts to reduce malnutrition by working with female community leaders, parents, teachers and local authorities as well as providing capacity building support for district staff and public health and social protection officials in Ventanilla district, outskirts of Lima. A new pilot project on hydroponics, supported by the Munich-based WFP Innovation Accelerator Centre, supports families to improve their eating habits for a balanced food consumption.