Roundup: UN releases "ground-breaking" analysis of school meal practices

The United Nations on Thursday released a major analysis of global school meal practices, which offers guidance on how to design and implement large-scale sustainable national school feeding programs that can meet globally approved standards.

The analysis documented and analyzed a range of government-led school meals programs to provide decision-makers and practitioners worldwide with the knowledge, evidence and good practice they need to strengthen their national school feeding efforts.

Produced by Imperial College London's Partnership for Child Development (PCD), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Bank, "the Global School Feeding Sourcebook: Lessons from 14 Countries" was created in response to demand from governments and development partners, UN officials said here.

The 14 countries are Botswana, Brazil, Cabo Verde, Chile, Cote D'Ivoire, Ecuador, Ghana, India, Kenya, Mali, Mexico, Namibia, Nigeria and South Africa.

School feeding programs have been defined by the World Bank as "targeted social safety nets that provide both educational and health benefits to the most vulnerable children, thereby increasing enrollment rates, reducing absenteeism, and improving food security at the household level."

Beyond improvements in access to food, school feeding programs also have a positive impact on nutritional status, gender equity, and educational status, each of which contributes to improving overall levels of country and human development.

With school meals' proven ability to improve the health and education of children while supporting local and national economies and food security, WFP reported that school feeding programs exist in almost every country in the world for which there is data, for a total annual global investment of 75 billion U.S. dollars.

This provides an estimated 368 million children -- about one in five -- with a meal at school daily. However, too often, such programs are weakest in countries where there is the most need, the UN agency warned.

With high-level collaboration with government teams from these 14 countries, the Sourcebook included a compilation of concise and comprehensive country case-studies. It highlighted the trade-offs associated with alternative school feeding models and analyzes the overarching themes, trends and challenges which run across them.

In a joint foreword, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim and World Food Programme Executive Director Ertharin Cousin said that the research showed how school meals programs help to get children into the classroom and keep them there, "contributing to their learning by avoiding hunger and enhancing cognitive abilities."

"Today, national school feeding programs are increasingly embedded in national policy on poverty elimination, social protection, education and nutrition," they said.

Meanwhile, lead Editor and PCD's Executive Director Lesley Drake said the overall message from this research is that there is no "one size fits all" for school feeding and there are many routes to success.

"Context is key," she noted. "This Sourcebook will act as a valuable tool for governments to enable them to make evidence-based decisions that will improve the effectiveness of their school feeding programs."

The Sourcebook follows Rethinking School Feeding and The State of School Feeding Worldwide as the third in a trilogy of agenda-defining analysis produced by the World Bank, WFP and PCD global partnership. These have reportedly shaped the way in which governments and donors alike approach school feeding.

"Helping countries to apply this knowledge [in the Sourcebook] to strengthen national school feeding programmes will contribute to reducing the vulnerability of the poorest, giving all children a chance for an education and a bright future and eliminating poverty," said Kim and Cousin.

While school meals are provided by the governments of most high and middle-income countries around the globe, the children who may benefit most from school feeding programs are in low-income countries that do not have government-provided school meals, reports said.

According to WFPe, 66 million primary school age children go hungry every day, with 23 million hungry children in Africa alone. Furthermore, 80 percent of these 66 million children are concentrated within just 20 countries.

Additionally, 75 million school-age children (55 percent of them girls) do not attend school, with 47 percent of them living in sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, the need to reduce hunger while increasing school enrollment in these children is evident, and school feeding programs have been developed to target this multifaceted problem.

Schools have become a natural and convenient setting for the implementation of health and education interventions. School feeding is just one facet of school health initiatives, as other programs may include de-worming, HIV/AIDS prevention and education, and life and health skills education.

Overall, school feeding programs have been shown to directly increase the educational and nutritional status of recipient children, and indirectly impact the economic and social lives of themselves and their families. Endit