Turkey will help ARMM feed school children from Marawi City

LANAO DEL SUR -- The Turkish government will help
feed school children from Marawi City now pursuing elementary studies in
temporary learning spaces (TLS) in safe areas.

John Magno, regional secretary of the Department of
Education-Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (DepEd-ARMM), said Friday the
Turk Isbirligi Ve Koordinasyon Idaresi Baskanligi (TIKA) will help them expand
their feeding program for children in TLS facilities that were launched last
month.

TIKA is most known as the Turkish Cooperation and
Coordination Agency.

Enes Dolukup, representative of TIKA to the
Philippines, and Magno met in Taguig City Thursday to finalize the humanitarian
partnership deal that would benefit thousands of elementary pupils now in
campuses outside of Marawi City.

TIKA will help expand our program so we can feed
more school children now in learning centers we recently established in school
campuses in neutral areas outside of Marawi City, Magno said.

Magno said all that Dolukup need for Turkey to start
assisting DepEd-ARMM’s feeding program are written recommendations on how TIKA
can best help in pushing the initiative forward.

We talked about expansion of kitchens in the campuses
where we relocated the children from Marawi City and they have, in principle,
agreed with a partnership deal, Magno said on Friday.

TIKA, established in 1992 and operating under the
office of the prime minister of Turkey, has various programs promoting economic
growth, trade, education and social development of poor citizens in different
countries.

DepEd-ARMM has been supplying school children from
Marawi City with hot meals daily for almost two weeks now through a feeding
program assisted by the service-oriented Gawad Kalinga entity and the Word Food
Programme of the United Nations.

The feeding intervention is meant to keep
internally-displaced children healthy as they proceed with their studies in TLS
facilities established by DepEd-ARMM. The TLS are in tents erected in open
spaces in campuses far from the battle-torn Marawi City, capital of Lanao del
Sur, one of ARMM’s five component-provinces.

The large tents for the TLS sites were supplied by
the United Nations Children’s Fund and the World Vision, an international
Christian child welfare and protection organization.

The TIKA promised to help sustain all these
programs, Magno said.

The first batch of children included in DepEd-ARMM’s
daily food rationing is comprised of a thousand pupils now in evacuation sites
in Saguiaran town in Lanao del Sur.

Magno said they intend to expand to 5,000 the number
of children they are to provide with cooked food each day through the program,
being implemented with the help of nutrition experts from Gawad Kalinga.

The Gawad Kalinga is a Philippine poverty
alleviation movement connected to funders of humanitarian activities benefiting
marginalized sectors.

We have briefed our Turkish friends on the
mechanics of these programs during our meeting. There was cordiality among us.
The meeting was so fruitful, Magno said.

Turkey is a member-state of the Organization of
Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of more than 50 Muslim countries, including
petroleum-exporting nations in the Middle East and North Africa.

Senior leaders of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front
and the Moro National Liberation Front separately said on Friday that they will
discuss the crisis in Marawi City with officials of the OIC during a meeting of
the Bangsamoro Coordination Forum (BCF) on July 8 in Abidjan, the capital of
Ivory Coast in Africa.

The BCF was organized about five years ago by both
fronts and the OIC as a vehicle for a common peace initiative intended to put a
diplomatic closure to the nagging decades-old Moro problem in Mindanao.

The OIC helped broker the September 2, 1996 final
peace compact between the government and the MNLF.

It is also supporting the current peace overture
between the government and the MILF, which splintered from the MNLF in 1980.

We will likely discuss possible solutions to the
problems now besetting Marawi City, the hostilities and destruction there and
needed rehabilitation efforts that should follow through, said Hatimil Hassan,
vice chairman of the MNLF.