Over 200 faculties will obtain funding from Australia by way of the Meals and Agriculture Group of the United Nations (FAO) to construct entrepreneurial faculty gardens within the North, Central and Uva Provinces to assist dietary safety amongst youngsters.
The entrepreneurial faculty gardens programme, carried out as a part of a undertaking funded by the Australian authorities totalling over USD 2.3 million, is aimed toward bettering the meals and dietary safety of teams most affected by the continued financial disaster, notably girls and youngsters.
The programme contains a discovery-based studying method for over 100,000 secondary faculty college students from grades 8 – 12, the place they are going to be educated on the capability to remodel their faculty gardens into sources of nutritious produce that can facilitate various and wholesome consuming habits and encourage college students to use entrepreneurial pondering into agriculture.
505 faculty academics from the three provinces had been additionally skilled on the discovery-based studying methodology as a part of the programme to enhance abilities in meals safety, vitamin, agriculture and entrepreneurship.
The Agriculture membership in every faculty might be empowered to function as a core programme accomplice that can oversee the coordination and navigation of the programme alongside faculty officers. It can additionally oversee the sale of harvests from the gardens, and might be linked to gross sales factors together with personal sector organisations, mother and father of scholars, native markets, or the nationwide faculty meal programme by way of FAO to make sure the harvests of the gardens generate an revenue – thereby making certain the sustainability of the gardens past the undertaking interval.
Australia’s Excessive Commissioner to Sri Lanka, Paul Stephens mentioned, “Faculty gardening has the potential to each enhance youngsters’s well being and assist studying. Involving college students in class gardening and educating them about the advantages of vitamin can have an enduring impression. This programme helps to spotlight the worth of rising meals for family meals safety.”
“We’re appreciative of this beneficiant help from the folks of Australia, which has enabled this sustainable school-to-home information switch method to strengthen meals safety amongst faculty youngsters,” mentioned FAO Consultant in Sri Lanka, Vimlendra Sharan including, “Faculty gardens supply wealthy environments for youngsters to have interaction in lively studying. The information might be transferred by college students to their relations and by extension, to the communities, prompting an attitudinal change on meals consumption habits and new agricultural ideas.”
