Mal-nutrition is a threat to school-age children in rural China: the anemia rate is 18%, stunted growth 26% and vitamin A deficiency 44.1%. A national survey shows wide spread deficiency in calcium, iron, and vitamin A.

Taking a tour to the primary and middle schools in rural China, you’ll see many children there who walk several miles from home to school, eat two meals per days with just simple breads, and have no nutrition catering either at home or at school. Those scenarios you will see are separated but intertwined: because children are living far away from the school, it’s difficult for them to manage three meals per day; because the family is generally lack of knowledge in nutrition, children’s parents or grandparents are just providing whatever they think could fill up children’s stomach such as simple breads; school won’t take this responsibility of catering children’ nutrition needs as they are lacking the resource to handle students’ nutrition issue and at the same time might not lack of the incentives to add this into their Education priority. The school mapping policy (merge different spread out village schools into one Centre Township school so that education resource could be more concentrated to improve the teaching quality) has also significantly impacted rural school-age children’s nutrition in-take as many children have to live even further away from home and do not have sufficient in-take of vegetables and dairy products. Parents lack awareness and capacity to ensure children’s nutrition while no investment is made at school to contra balance the issue. Poor hygiene practice and sanitation facilities also further deteriorate nutrition status.

There are different ways to tackle this issue, either through charitable donation or market solution, but both ways would have difficulties to make a sustainable solution. For charitable donation, it would be very difficult for any organization to continuously provide financial support for food supply within the schools. For market solution, the profit margin will be very little if anyone runs a restaurant in the rural schools, not to mention that rural schools are generally lack of basic facility for restaurant business; also profit driven school restaurant might not be able to meet children’s nutrition needs taken into the consideration of the actual price that rural children’s family can afford.

A good solution that some NGO has been trying to provide is to combine the two, charitable donation and market solution, into one model which is replicatable and sustainable. There has been some School Nutrition Program in Western China run by international NGO and it has proved to be quite useful in tackling the nutrition issue in the rural schools. The idea is to first provide cash donation to help build related school facility such as dinning hall and kitchen in the schools and then start a biding process to recruit local people who are willing to run the restaurant business in the school; there should be a control of the number of restaurants who will get the bid as healthy competition will offer more competitive food price for the school students. After the bidding, specific guidelines on nutrition, hygiene and price will be offered to the school restaurants so that students could enjoy healthy and nutritional food with reasonable price every day at school. As for some expensive nutritional food materials such as meats and milks, creative gift program could be set up to provide subsidies for the students, for example through setting up fundraising campaign to encourage the public to ‘Donate a pig to rural school in China’ and ‘Donate a cow to rural school in China’. Different stocks that have been fundraised could later be bred by either the school or the local village households and be sent to the school restaurants to proceed with a cheap and nutritional menu for school students. In this way, a sustainable model with the combination of charitable donation and market solution is created to help the children in rural schools get the necessary nutrition for a healthy growth.

There are also other ideas to think about along this nutrition program such as: collaborating with the local education bureau, educating the local community -specifically children, parents and village representatives, simple and innovative nutrition measurement system that children will self-administer, integrating external experts support, etc.

The sustainability of a program could always mean creating long lasting motives for community members to work towards the single goal, changing people’s mindset for making better decisions, or advocating a successful model to government so that a right policy could be set to benefit the society long-termly on a while. In the process of designing a sustainable program, it’s worthwhile to always bear in mind that profit generating business model could sometimes be more sustainable than one time charitable donation and this could benefit the some program which could take the advantage of the two.

A Step closer to Microfinance in China Microcredit lenders ermerging in China By Wang Lan, is an article that looks to shed some light about the stage and interpretation of microfinance in China.

By definition, microfinance is the service of giving very small loans (as little as $20) to very poor people without assets or collateral. These types of loans are typically given to a group of people, who commit to help each other when someone in the group is not able to make a payment. As I read the article I quickly noticed that the term microfinance was used in a very loose way, which included giving loans and credit to small to medium business owners.

“Microcredit lenders, once the quaint peripheral players in China’s mammoth financial system, are emerging from the shadows of the State-owned banks as white knights to thousands of small, cash-strapped manufacturers around the nation.

The spate of bankruptcies in the manufacturing sector, particularly in the Pearl River Delta region, has prompted the government to act by selectively relaxing credit controls three times in the past two months.”

This is could be good news to local and international microfinance/poverty alleviation organizations with projects in China, if it means these laws will provide microfinance financial institutions (MFIs) with more access to capital. Since local microfinance MFIs often do not have the accountability and transparency needed for access to capital from big banks and lending institutions, they rely on microfinance banks, such as the Grameen Bank to help them with capacity building and financing.

The article continues to explain how in 2005 the People’s Bank of China, initiated the first government-lead pilot project to promote and support rural poor and agriculture, which was later modified to provide loans to small business owners who had been affected by tighter monetary policies.

Perhaps because of China’s size nothing is “micro” here. If the goal is to help cash-strapped small business owners and to stimulate the economy, it may take some time until the very poor gain access to microfinance services, at least from the major national banks.

The collapse of the Doha round of WTO talks is a real shame. Traditionally the talks were seen as a north v south issue. The North (or West or Rich or Developed World) wanted greater access to the South (or East or Poor or Developing World) to sell more services in particular. The South wanted more access to sell agricultural crops to the North. China has been mentioned, critically, in reports of the collapse. This is unusual, normally it was the US, Europe or Japan being criticised.

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