Children Can’t Wait: Emergency School Meals
by Sabah Alsudan for Development Organization (SDO)
Children Can’t Wait: Emergency School Meals – Sabah Alsudan for Development Organization (SDO) will provide nutritious breakfast meals 3 days per week to ~7,500 vulnerable children in 50 schools in Khartoum State over 6 months. The project aims to reduce malnutrition, improve academic performance, encourage regular attendance, and raise awareness of healthy nutrition among children, families, and teachers.
The recent conflict in Sudan has caused severe humanitarian challenges, including displacement, poverty, and malnutrition among children. Many schools were damaged or used as shelters for displaced families, resulting in increased school dropout rates and childhood hunger.
Overall objective:
To reduce 30 % of mal-nutrition cases and improve academic performance among 7,500 children less than 13 years in the basic schools around Khartoum State by 2026-2027.
Specific Objectives:
1. Provide 3 nutritious breakfast meals per week.
2. Support severely malnourished children with additional supplements if needed.
3. Increase school attendance and retention.
4. Raise awareness about balanced nutrition.
5. Train teachers and parent councils on food diversification.
6. Promote hygiene practices (handwashing).
7. Monitor academic performance and nutritional status.
Target Beneficiaries:
• Direct: ~7,500 children aged 6–13 from displaced, refugee, and low-income families.
• Indirect: Families (~7,500 households), teachers, parent councils, and the wider community.
Implementation Plan:
• Meals distributed 3 days/week in schools.
• Teachers, parent councils, and volunteers participate in preparation, distribution, and monitoring.
• Awareness workshops for children, families, and teachers.
• Continuous monitoring of attendance, academic performance, and nutritional status.
Expected Outcomes:
• 7,500 children receive nutritious breakfast meals 3 days/week.
• Improved academic performance and concentration.
• Increased school attendance and retention, especially girls.
• Increased awareness of healthy nutrition among children, families, and teachers.
• Community engagement in supporting school feeding and nutrition education.
Project Outcome:
7,500 of mal-nourished children have access to therapeutic nutrition, improved access to food of high nutritive value, improved children performance & understanding capacity, built capacity of families and teachers on balance diet provision and change in perception of nutritional culture.
Project Outputs:
Output 1:
Support for awareness on nutritional culture and diversification for,300 teachers and 25,000 households provided.
Output1 Activities:
Mobilize the teachers and families’ members in the basic schools for the implementation of the awareness workshops.
Prepare the beneficiaries lists and make them ready for the workshop.
Divide the groups into 4 groups in each school for easy information dissemination and gender balanced.
Execute the awareness workshops on how to improve nutritional status of their children in various selected schools.
Monitor the impact of the intervention on the beneficiaries’ food security situations.
Output 2:
7,500 basic school children received breakfast meals in time, pupils in the school are informed about the importance of quality nutrition and enrollment in the schools increased.
Output 2 Activities:
Mobilize the targeted basic schools around Khartoum State
Procurement of schools’ food for the targeted number of the pupils
dialy distribution of food diet in the school for daily pupils consumption
Prepare the lists of the beneficiaries to receive the supplementary food to boost family nutritional problems.
Follow-up of feeding programs daily and weekly and provides monthly report.
Monitor the impact of the intervention on the beneficiaries’ food security situations.
Conduct health and hygiene promotion in the schools (Wash Hands )
Description of Beneficiaries;
The data collected by SDO, INGOs, NGOs, Ministry of Education and Instruction (MoE) and UN agencies working in the Education cluster sector indicates that the same activities underlying food gaps in families’ affects performance and understanding capacity of pupils in the basic schools.
There are food gap amid the pupils in basic schools which are indicated in the survey report conducted by UNICEF (2025) 5-6 millions of children are suffering from malnutrition who are living in Sudan and one million Sudanese children are need feeding in school and that million children under the age of 5 years suffers from acute malnutrition.
Based on the above narrative background mal-nutrition have been a target for intervention to bridge the nutritional gaps among the children less than 13 years in basic and Medill schools at outskirts of Khartoum state being in IDPs camps and civilian .
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