Food for Education

The key objective of the McGovern-Dole Program is to reduce hunger and improve literacy and primary education, especially for girls. By providing school meals, teacher training and related support, McGovern-Dole projects help boost school enrollment and academic performance. At the same time, the program also focuses on improving children’s health and learning capacity before they enter school by offering nutrition programs for pregnant and nursing women, infants and pre-schoolers.

Sustainability is an important aspect of the McGovern-Dole Program. FAS and its partner organizations work to ensure that the communities served by the program can ultimately continue the sponsored activities on their own or with support from other sources such as the host government or local community.

Private voluntary organizations, cooperatives, intergovernmental organizations, governments of developing countries and their agencies, and other organizations.

The McGovern-Dole Program focuses on developing countries in which the national government of the recipient country is fully committed to achieving the goals of the World Declaration on Education for All and is taking steps to improve the quality and availability of education.

FAS will assemble a panel committee consisting of technical reviewers and scorers to review applications for each individual Funding Opportunity or Track. This panel may include both Federal and non-Federal persons. The panel committee will review the programmatic merits of the applications based on the evaluation criteria identified in the Notice of Funding Opportunity. Following panel committee review, technical reviewer and scorers who participated on the panel committee will provide summary comments, scorers and funding recommendations on the application. The FAS Administrator will make the final selection of applications to approve for funding. The FAS Administrator will give serious consideration to recommendations from IFAD and the panel committees, but may also consider the following factors in making the award selections: Agency priorities, such as achieving greater geographical dispersion, program balance, or diversity; and the agency’s alignment within USG’s whole of government approach to agricultural development and innovation, as determined by USDA.