Enhanced access to inclusive, protective and quality education through promoting enrollment and attendance as well as preventing and minimizing diseases outbreak in Panyijiar and Rubkona Counties - Unity State, South Sudan The proposed emergency response project seeks to promote school enrollment, increase attendance and retention through providing emergency school feeding, preventing and reducing disease outbreaks in Unity State, Panyijiar and Rubkona counties. The two project components of:  School feeding and WASH in schools will be implemented in Panyijiar while in Rubkona, Mercy Corps proposes to implement WASH in Schools interventions only. Mercy Corps has on-going integrated emergency response programs in four sectors of education, WASH, FSL and Child Protection in Unity State. 
The proposed project will implement the following:  

A: Emergency School feeding to reduce malnutrition and promote school enrollment, attendance and retention of conflict affected boys and girls in Panyijiar. Under this intervention, Mercy Corps will engage local community stakeholders, PTAs, local leadership, youth to jointly identify 8 schools and/or learning spaces to participate in emergency school feeding. Other activities that will be conducted during the inception phase (month 1) of this project include minor repairs of school kitchens and warehouses, mobilization for coordinating provision of community contributions such as labor, firewood and additional cooking utensils training community members on nutrition, health and food handling. Moreover, the project will distribute ready meals (high energy bars and fruit) to avoid delays in provision of food that might result from project set up modalities. From month two going forward, the project will distribute hot cooked meals based on the WFP food basket to boys and girls in 8 primary schools for 5 days a week. To mitigate the risk of school drop out for girls in upper primary classes, the project will distribute take- home rations to 85 senior girls in the 8 schools. 

B: The WASH in schools interventions will focus on preventing and reducing the outbreak of cholera and other water borne diseases. The project will repair school latrines and install hand washing facilities in 14 schools in the two counties of Panyijiar and Rubkona. Moreover, the project will conduct hygiene promotion session messaging on cholera symptoms, modes of transmission, prevention and referral pathways to health care centers for cholera treatment. Additionally, the project will request dignity kits for school girls and soap for handwashing from the WASH Cluster core pipeline for distribution.   . 

C: Capacity strengthening is a cross-cutting aspect in this emergency response project. The project will mobilize and train of 561 community members (224 women 337 men) PTAs, youth and local administration on psycho-social support, WASH, nutrition, disease prevention and life-skills. Mercy Corps will also train teachers and PTA on management of school feeding program including school kitchen, menu planning (variety in weekly menus), alternative cooking methods and food preservation. Vegetable gardening and micro-gardens will be also promoted in target schools engaging children in higher classes and PTA which will enable schools to produce complementary foods such as greens vegetables for cooking supplements.