Odisha government and United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) have partnered to improve household food and nutritional security.

Key Points:

=> Household food & nutritional security would be improved by strengthening livelihood initiatives & reaching out to state-supported Women’s Self-Help Groups (WSHGs).

=> This is a significant partnership to achieve nutritional security in Odisha which will also focus on empowerment, livelihood and incomes of women.

=> Such initiatives are important to address and reduce vulnerabilities across food security.

=> This partnership will be in effect till December 2023.

Empowering Women:

Sustainable livelihoods will improve household food and nutritional security. It will lead to holistic empowerment of women. Collaboration between Odisha government and WFP will support Women’s Self-Help Groups (WSHGs) by providing them technical assistance and capacity development. It will directly contribute to long-term food security and develop a replicable model. Partnership will also focus on creating livelihood opportunities, improve household nutritional security and increase participation of women in decision making fulfilling the core objectives of Department of Mission Shakti.

Objective of partnership:

Partnership was done do improve linkage of women’s groups with government procurement systems. It will increase awareness on entitlements, build capacity of women’s groups, develop monitoring tools and undertake evaluations to improve functioning of SHGs.

UN World Food Programme (WFP):

WEP is a food-assistance branch of United Nations. It is world’s largest humanitarian organization, focusing on hunger & food security and is the largest provider of school meals. WEP was founded in 1961 with headquarter in Rome. It has served 97 million people across 88 countries, as of 2019.  It was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020 for its efforts of providing food assistance in areas with conflict and to prevent use of food as weapon of war & conflict.