Evidence-based support for school meal programs

• In Event: Food for education: strategies for sustainable school meals programs

Proposal

Implementation of large-scale school feeding programs is complex and difficult; it takes years to build a solid, well-performing program, and even solid programs require careful monitoring and the ongoing adoption of improvements as the programs evolve and new problems and solutions emerge. Due to their complexity and the influence of factors outside the programs’ control, measuring the impact and accurately ascribing attribution to large-scale school food programs is extremely difficult, even in situations where financial resources and expertise are available. However, evidence shows that school meal programs work, and work in powerful ways, with specific and long-lasting benefits to the individual families and children who participate, but with clear benefits as well for communities and countries where they are implemented.

Nearly every country in the world has some form of school meal program. (World Food Programme 2013, Bundy et al 2009). Unfortunately, the coverage of school meal programs is weakest in the very places where the need is the greatest: In low-income countries, only about 18 percent of school children are provided school meals; 49 percent in upper-middle-income countries. To compound the issue, coverage is also the lowest in countries that are most threatened by the potential withdrawal of donor assistance.

The issue for the US, as for countries everywhere, is not whether school meal programs are effective. School food programs are good for the children they serve and for the economic development of the countries where they are implemented. The issue is not even whether the programs are effectively implemented. The network of organizations and leaders in the realm of school feeding that has evolved—aided significantly by the opportunity to share learning at the Global Child Nutrition Forum over the past 19 years—is stronger and better equipped than ever to help get it right. These include numerous players in addition to GCNF, ranging from national government leaders from over 50 countries around the globe and regional bodies; multilateral institutions; numerous private sector entities; foundations; and academic institutions. These players are collaborating extensively, in unprecedented ways, to ensure that programs are sharing and benefiting from one another’s experience and expertise.

The issue is not politics nor political parties. Leaders across the political spectrum have supported school meal programs throughout the decades and continue to until present. The issue, rather, is political will. The Global Child Nutrition Foundation and its partners can attest to the fact that the leaders of some of the poorest countries in the world are demonstrating unshakable support for feeding their young and vulnerable citizens at school. We hope that the leaders of the United States and of the world’s other rich countries will have the political will to support the nutrition of their own young and vulnerable citizens, and to help those countries with fewer resources to do the same.

Author

• Arlene Mitchell, Global Child Nutrition Foundation