By KYIV. Dec 27 (Interfax-Ukraine) – UNICEF will send donor assistance to 1,000 flagship schools in Ukraine for canteen equipment in the amount of $2,000 each, First Lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska has said.
According to a statement issued by the press service of the Office of the President of Ukraine on Tuesday, such data is indicated in the first of a series of publications by Olena Zelenska on the results of her work in 2022.
"A thousand flagship schools will receive UNICEF donor assistance in the amount of $2,000 for canteen equipment," it says.
The publication is dedicated to school nutrition reform, which was launched at the initiative of the president’s wife on January 1, 2022, before the full-scale Russian invasion. When the full-scale aggression began, a large number of people needed hot meals. Schools, which, thanks to the reform, had modernized equipment, were able to cook hundreds of thousands of meals.
Zelenska focused on the main directions in which the reform was moving this year. Among them, the creation of prerequisites for the start of construction works at the kitchen factory in Bucha, which is due to be launched on September 1, 2023.
"It will become a pilot project, and in the future the network of kitchen factories will be extended to the entire territory of Ukraine. Each of them will be able to provide food for 30-40 educational institutions," the press service said.
In addition, according to the statement, with the support of the Ukrainian-Swiss DECIDE program, a series of strategic sessions on school nutrition reform were held.
"It is important that in such difficult conditions, educational institutions have the opportunity to organize catering and at the same time that the quality and safety of food does not deteriorate," the first lady said.
Also, the team of the Institute for Educational Analytics, the Swiss-Ukrainian project DECIDE and the Education Ministry of Ukraine conduct a research on the condition of school catering in order to form a map of needs and identify the most pressing problems of communities in catering. The training of cooks and the filling and development of the ZnaYimo portal will continue.
