School lunch program aids 36,467 pupils

The Free Lunch for Children Program has helped 36,467 students in 205 primary schools across the country since it began offering free lunches to students in rural primary schools nearly two years ago, the program announced during its second anniversary ceremony in Shanghai Tuesday.

The program has raised 48 million yuan ($7.74 million) since it started on April 2, 2011, according to a press release issued for the event at Tongji University. Although the program has helped fund free lunch programs in 17 provinces across the country, it has given the most assistance to schools in Hubei, Hunan and Sichuan provinces.

The program was started by Deng Fei, an investigative journalist from the Hong Kong-based magazine Phoenix Weekly, after he saw many students going hungry at lunchtime when he visited a primary school in Guizhou Province. In a post on his microblog in January 2011, he appealed to the public to help fix the problem.

The outpouring of support resulted in the Free Lunch for Children Program, which Deng launched with the help of the China Social Welfare Foundation, dozens of media outlets and more than 500 individual journalists.

China's central and local governments gave 31 million yuan to the program in 2012, said Liu Yuguang, director of the Compulsory Education Fund Office of the Ministry of Education.

The program prompted the central government to start a 16-billion yuan national program to improve children's nutrition, according to the press release. The ministry has spent 20 billion yuan building canteens for schools in rural areas.

Since 2011, the Free Lunch for Children Program has cooperated with the national program in Xinhuang county in Hunan Province and Hefeng county in Hubei Province. The two programs will work together in another county in Hunan Province and plan to cooperate further across the province.

Deng also announced plans to improve the program's transparency. Currently, it requires all of the participating schools to report how much money they spend. It also plans to install video cameras in the kitchens of schools to ensure that they are providing enough safe food for the students, Deng said.

The program accepts donations through its online store on taobao.com.