Policy Instrument:

School meals programmes

Keywords: Meals; Malnutrition; In-Kind Transfers; Children; Family Farming; Public Procurement

Definition

School Meals Programmes (SMPs) provide healthy, nutritious food to children, utilising schools as a delivery platform. SMPs typically operate through three modalities:

In-school meals: A breakfast or lunch (or both) is provided within school premises.
In-school snack: A snack is provided to children, e.g., milk, high-energy biscuits, or fruits.
Take-home rations: Food is provided to school-going children's families, usually contingent upon children attending a certain amount of schooling.

Beyond food provision, SMPs offer a unique platform for embedding complementary quality-enhancing actions, including food fortification, dietary diversification, and clean cooking practices. They can also integrate food and nutrition education, health interventions (e.g., handwashing with soap, height measurement, weight measurement, deworming treatment, immunizations, eye testing and eyeglasses, hearing testing and treatment, dental cleaning and testing, menstrual hygiene, drinking water and water purification), as well as improved sanitation facilities and awareness.

Rationale

In certain contexts, SMPs can be designed to achieve multiple outcomes, including poverty reduction, alleviating child hunger, reducing malnutrition, enhancing access to quality education, and fostering improved learning outcomes. In addition, these programmes can effectively address specific vulnerabilities such as promoting girls’ education and retention in school through interventions like take-home rations.

Home-grown school feeding programmes can further strengthen local production and delivery chains by leveraging the institutional demand created by school meals to support local smallholder production through regional and local purchase. By creating this structured demand, these programmes can act as a catalyst for food systems transformation, making them more nourishing, sustainable, resilient and inclusive.

Key Features

Coverage: The coverage of SMPs varies in terms of the types of schools included. Depending on the country context, programmes may cover one or more levels of schooling, including pre-primary, primary, and secondary education.
Targeting: Several targeting approaches may be employed, including: universal targeting, whereby all students in a given school or grade level receive a school meal; geographic targeting, directed towards areas with high levels of poverty, food insecurity, and malnutrition; and individual targeting, where students are selected based on their individual characteristics, such as household income or membership in a specific group.
Delivery: The level of centralisation varies across programmes. Governments mcan either opt for a centralised model, whereby in-kind commodities or cash and vouchers are provided directly from the central government to schools, or they can choose a decentralised approach, wherein food vouchers or cash transfers enable subnational actors or schools themselves to procure commodities. In some contexts, a hybrid approach may also be employed, combining centralised procurement (e.g., for dry goods) with decentralised procurement (e.g., for perishable goods). Programmes also differ in where meals are prepared — on school premises (on-site) or off premises (off-site), depending on factors such as the number of children and meals served served, complexity of menu items, kitchen facilities/infrastructure, and transportation logistics (distribution of meals to individual schools).
Financing: There exists a heterogeneity with respect to the financing options that governments employ to support SMPs. They are primarily financed through non-contributory means drawn from general government revenue, which constitutes approximately 98 percent of the total financing for school meals globally (WFP, 2022). Non-contributory financing for this policy instrument typically includes tax financing (direct, indirect, or both). Donor funding in the form of grants or loans provides an additional source of non-government and non-contributory financing; which in low-income countries accounts for approximately 55 percent of SMPs funding (WFP, 2022). In other countries, some communities, the private sector, or civil society organisations also contribute to the provision of school meals.

School-aged children, particularly those from vulnerable low- income families.

Prior conditions for successful implementation

Strong pre-existing political commitment for school meals, particularly at the highest levels;
Establishing and enforcing standards for nutritional quality and food safety in all school meals;
Existence of a policy, legal, regulatory framework governing the implementation of the national programme, including an established institutional arrangement for programme delivery and nutritional guidelines and standards for school meals;
Assured availability of sustainable funding and a financial commitment to sustain operations of the policy instrument into the long-term;
Clearly defined programme objectives and targeting approach for selecting beneficiaries (individual, geographic or universal);
Availability of adequate enabling infrastructure and facilities, including school kitchens, food preparation (e.g., planet-friendly cooking appliances) and food storage facilities, water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure, transport and energy;
Adequate number of food service providers (cooks, nutritionists) and investments in strengthening their competencies and capacities. This will help ensure adherence to nutritional and food safety standards. Additionally, it will allow teachers to focus on teaching, limiting disruptions to the learning environment;
Sound funding for social behaviour change communication;
Establishment of a robust country-wide monitoring and evaluation framework for school meals for evidence-generation, oversight and accountability;
Established mechanisms for community participation;
Established multi-sectoral and multi-disciplinary coordination mechanisms that involve education, health, agriculture and social protection sectors and engage other sectors as the need arises;
Designed to be shock-responsive to respond to unforeseen food, climate, socio-political and health shocks (e.g., pandemics, natural disasters, food crises and conflict).

Limitations

Constrained fiscal space preventing scale-up of school meal programmes;
For governments seeking to transition to or scale up home-grown school feeding programmes, structural barriers could limit smallholder farmer participation. These barriers could include poor yields and quality produce, poor rural infrastructure driving up logistic costs, long distances between schools and farms, etc.;
While school meal programmes generally promote social inclusion, there are rare instances where they can inadvertently lead to social exclusion (e.g., when children are unable to participate due to medical, cultural or religious reasons or due to [real or perceived] stigma or where there are inclusion and exclusion errors in targeting).).

Needs for Complementary Interventions

SMPs may integrate or synergize with complementary activities, depending on the country, such as:

Health-related interventions: handwashing with soap, height measurement, weight measurement, deworming treatment, eye testing and eyeglasses, hearing testing and treatment, dental cleaning and testing, menstrual hygiene, drinking water and water purification, immunization;
Education-related interventions that cover topics such as: food and nutrition education, health and life skills education, physical education, hygiene, sexual and reproductive health, and environmental and ecological literacy through school gardens;
School infrastructure-related interventions: construction of school kitchens and the purchase of cooking equipment. WASH facilities etc.;
Mobilization of sufficient and skilled human resources in capacity to support scaling-up school meal programmes;
Standards and regulatory measures should govern the promotion of unhealthy foods and beverages high in added sugars, salt, saturated fat and low in nutritive value in school cafeterias, food stores and vending machines. Marketing of such items within the school premises should be restricted to promote a healthy school food environment;
Food systems-related interventions: interventions across the school meal value chain that support smallholder farmers with enhancing food production and post-harvest handling and other actors in the processing of food (e.g., food fortification);

Potential Risks

Economic, conflict, health (e.g., diseases/pandemics) and/or climate shocks and pipeline risks with respect to food supply to schools due to inefficient and unpredictable value chains, impacting food prices or availability, threatening the financial sustainability of programmes;
Challenges in ensuring meal quality and safety: School meals primarily composed of refined grains with limited quantities of pulses and oil may reduce hunger but contribute to worsening rates of malnutrition, both in terms of macro and micro-nutrient deficiencies and diet-related chronic diseases. Whenever possible, and when conditions allow, a combination of vegetables, pulses, animal-source foods, and fortified staples should be included to ensure impact on nutrition, health and education outcomes.
Hygiene and food safety practices and regulations, are needed to avoid adverse effects from aflatoxins, bacterial contaminants or other harmful unintended effects that can undermine child health and development;
Politicization of school meal programmes, hindering design (e.g., targeting approach) and implementation (e.g., awarding of contracts to suppliers and food service providers) without analyzing or taking into consideration parents’, teachers’ and children’s points of view, particularly their perceptions of stigma, the participation of some families and children may be limited.

a) support the expansion of coverage of those either experiencing poverty or vulnerable to it in national social protection systems and addressing risks and contingencies throughout their lifecycle (SDG target 1.3), therefore, contributing to the progressive realization of the right to social security, b) contribute to the realization of the right to adequate food in the context of national food security in order to achieve a world free from hunger (SDG targets 2.1 and 2.3), c) support access to basic services (education, health, water and sanitation and housing), productive assets, appropriate technology (prioritizing low-carbon options), information, integrated social and economic inclusion programmes, skill building (including technical assistance and extension services in rural areas), financial inclusion, decent employment creation and access to safe, nutritious, and sufficient food (e.g.,home-grown school meal programmes) (SDG targets 1.4, 2.1 and 2.2), d) Contribute to addressing discrimination against women that leads to poverty, hunger and malnutrition such as differences in the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity between men and women, absence of women equal rights to economic resources, as well as of access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance and natural resources, in accordance with national laws (SDG targets 5.a1 and 5.a.2), or contribute to recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate (SDG 5.4), e) target smallholder farmers (family farmers, forest dependent groups, fisherfolks, pastoralists) and among them those more likely to be left behind (e.g. women, youth, elderly, indigenous populations, communities which are land-locked or living in isolated areas, pastoralists, fishers, forest dwellers) with a view to increasing their productivity and incomes through secure and equal access to land, other productive resources and inputs, knowledge, financial services, remittances and diaspora contributions, access to credit and markets, including institutional markets, and opportunities for value addition as well as non-farm employment (SDG target 2.3) and promoting rural and territorial development, f) reach out to food consumers vulnerable to food insecurity and malnutrition, with a view of promoting information and facilitating access to healthy diets, including through education, g) foster sustainable and healthy food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production while maintaining ecosystems, including agroecology, agroforestry and payment for environmental services, that strengthen capacity for adaptation to climate change, extreme weather, drought, flooding, and other disasters and that progressively improve land and soil quality and maintain fish stocks (SDG target 2.4), and h) reduce the exposure and vulnerability and increase the resilience of poor and vulnerable populations to climate related-extreme events and social, economic, and environmental shocks and disasters, as well as their capacity to properly respond to these shocks, when they occur (SDG targets 1.5 and 2.4)

Universal Declaration of Human Rights – Art. 25;

International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) – Art. 11, 12, 13;

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – Art. 24 (1);

Convention on the Rights of a Child (CRC),– Art. 3 [3], 6, 18[3], 23, 24 [2c], 26, 27[1-3], 28; General Comment 15 on Art. 24 paragraph 2 (c);

Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) – Art. 10 (f)’

Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People – Art. 14[2-3], 17[2], 21[2]

Sustainable Development Goals;

Recommendation on Education for Peace, Human Rights and Sustainable Development (Section V.1 System-wide requirements paragraph 10e, 41c).

World Health Assembly Recommendations on the Marketing of Food and Non-alcoholic Beverages to Children (Resolution WHA63.14);

Codex Alimentarius General Principles of Food Hygiene;

UNCITRAL Model Law on Public Procurement (Art. 11, Section 3b)