NGO, Internationaal Christelijk Steunfonds (ICS), in Busia and Teso districts in Western Kenya. The districts count approximately 350 preschools. Busia and Teso districts are poor and have low educational achievement by Kenyan standards.<sup>19</sup> In 1994, annual per capita income in those districts was only 48 percent of the national average. In 1997, 51 percent of people in the districts were living in “hard-core poverty”.<sup>20</sup> Malnutrition and hunger are highly prevalent in the districts. Nutrition indicators from 1994 show that 39 percent of children were stunted and 9 percent of children were wasted.<sup>21</sup> ICS organized and funded the provision of a school breakfast in 25 schools, randomly chosen from a pool of 50 schools.(Figure 1) The breakfast consisted of a cup of porridge made from a protein-rich ‡our mixture, sugar, corn oil and water. One 500 ml serving has a nutrition value of 422 calories. Porridge is a common, culturally appropriate meal for both adults and children in Kenya. The variety served by ICS was sweeter, contained more fat, and was more nutritious than the average porridge served for breakfast in homes. ICS provided ingredients according to the number of children enrolled in the preschool class. Breakfast was prepared in the school on every school day by a cook under supervision of a parent representative. It was served to the preschool pupils, their teacher(s) and the parent representative. Primary school pupils and teachers were not included in the feeding.

The organization of the program was split between ICS, the schools, the cook and the parents. ICS provided the food, the transportation of the food to the school compound, the cooking utensils, hired a local woman as a cook in every school and paid her a salary. ICS ...eld workers visited the schools at least once per term for monitoring purposes. The schools were responsible for providing a storage facility for the food and a proper cooking area, separate from the preschool classroom. Parents were responsible for supplying ...rewood for cooking the porridge and a cup for each child. In each school, a Feeding Committee was elected by the parents to oversee the daily implementation of the program and check the preschool teacher’s attendance register. All positions in the breakfast program except the cook’s were voluntary, though the cook, the parent representative and the teacher were allowed to eat porridge. ICS created a paid position for cooks to prevent the feeding from taking too much time from the teachers and to prevent girls from higher grades being called from their classes to prepare meals for the preschoolers.

> 19 Data in this paragraph are from the Welfare Monitoring Survey II (1994) and III (1997), both published by the Kenya Central Bureau of Statistics.

> 20 The hard-core poor are de...ned as those who would not meet the minimum food calorie requirements even if they concentrated all their spending on food. In this case the rural hard-core poor are those whose total expenditure is less than KShs 927 (approx. 11.5 USD) per equivalent adult per month.

> 21 Children are stunted (wasted) if their height (weight) Z-scores falll below two standard deviations from the median of the reference population.

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