By Rick Del Vecchio

Thousands of school children in the West African nation of Ghana are enjoying better nutrition, under a boldly entrepreneurial feeding program aided by UC Berkeley MBA students.

Eleven students spent three weeks in Ghana last May and June as consultants on the project, which has the ambitious aim of distributing locally grown food to 4 million school children, or a third of Ghana's school-age population.

The project is unprecedented in its goal of creating a sustainable school-nutrition business on a national scale. The core idea is simple: use locally grown food and local distributors instead of donations given out by relief organizations.

The obstacles are great but the potential rewards are global, not only in improving health and education but in building a foundation for economic development in impoverished nations worldwide, said Sebastian Teunissen, an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and executive director of the Clausen Center for International Business and Policy.

"Nothing like this has happened anywhere else in the world," he said. "This is the first national school feeding program. A lot is riding on it."

An MBA student team, as part of the International Business Development Program at Haas, first visited Ghana in 2005 to develop a strategy to expand an existing feeding program at eight schools near Kumasi. UC Berkeley alumnus Richard H. Beahrs, a member of the UN Millennium Project's Task Force on Hunger, funded the trip.

Beahrs liked the students' report and presented it to the task force. Another task force member, Hans Eenhoorn, recommended it to the Dutch Minister for Development. The result was a commitment by the Dutch government to spend $25 million a year on the project over 10 years.

Today, two years later, the program has grown from the initial eight schools to more than 1,000.

Three student teams returned last year, assigned to advise their Ghanaian clients on financial, management and logistical problems confronting the program's national expansion. The teams also had the task of framing the case for long-term funding from a major U.S. philanthropic donor.

On arrival the students found that their clients were interested less in macroeconomic analysis than in such pressing matters as school gardens, cookware and warehousing.

"It's a lot more complicated when you're on the ground talking to local people about implementation than it is when you're reading a document here in Berkeley," student Julia Ponce said.

Student Cliff Dank learned much by talking to schoolchildren individually.

Dank recalled, "One child came up to me and said, 'I want to tell you that the food is very good. But we want breakfast. We're hungry in the morning...and we want soccer balls and jerseys. We have to borrow from other schools and it's embarrassing.'"

At that moment Dank realized both how successful the feeding program was and how far it had to go.

Rick Del Vecchio is a freelance writer based in Oakland, Calif.