Tomorrow Today

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Sustainable school feeding

Nancy Walters, Chief, School Feeding Policy Division, World Food Programme

urrently an estimated 66 million children attend school

hungry – about 40 per cent of them in Africa – and an

additional 72 million children in this age group do not

attend school at all. As the leading humanitarian agency in the

fight against hunger, the World Food Programme (WFP) has

been supporting educational development through school feeding

programmes for over 45 years. Through partnerships with both

the public and private sector, 22 million children in 63 countries

benefited from WFP’s school feeding programmes in 2009. Of

these, 10.5 million were in 37 African countries.

Food security and nutrition play an important role in educational

development. School feeding offers an incentive for households to

send their children to school to receive an education, while also

reducing short-term hunger and improving their nutrition and

health. Evidence has shown that where there is a social safety net

that addresses food security and nutrition to school children, access

to education increases and educational performance improves.

Over the last year, WFP has revised its school feeding policy to

focus on sustainability. In the past, WFP very often implemented

school feeding as a stand-alone intervention, with little planning

for national ownership. WFP, governments and other partners

have recognized the potential of school feeding as part of a holistic

national development strategy and have shifted the school feeding

paradigm to focus on sustainability and national ownership. Since

2008, the World Bank and WFP have been working together to help

counties transition and develop the capacity for sustainable school

feeding programmes. A 2009 joint publication by the World Bank

and WFP, titled

Rethinking School Feeding: Social Safety Nets, Child

Development, and the Education Sector

, provides a road map for coun-

tries of the costs and benefits of implementing sustainable school

feeding programmes, in the context of a productive safety net and a

fiscally sustainable investment in human capital.

The strength of school feeding as an educational tool is its long-

term investment in human capital by achieving multi-sector benefits

in nutrition, education, value transfer, gender equality and wider

socio-economic gains. By investing in the health and nutrition of

school-age children, a country can increase the human capital of its

younger generation and achieve sustainable economic growth and

human development. The combination of multiple benefits with the

shift in the school feeding paradigm makes significant contributions

in building sustainability.

The multiple benefits of sustainable school feeding

School feeding programmes are much more than simply giving food

to people in need. Solid empirical evidence of the impact of school

feeding programmes on educational outcomes proves that school

feeding increases school enrolment and attendance by reducing

school drop-out rates.

1,2,3

There is also significant evidence that

proves school feeding goes beyond the educational

outcomes, producing an array of benefits across disci-

plines. The productive safety-net function provided

through its multiple benefits in education, nutrition

and gender is well known. Innovative school feeding

programmes provide multi-sector benefits such as

education, improved environment, gender equality,

food security, poverty alleviation, nutrition and health

– in one single intervention. School feeding is an invest-

ment in human capital, which yields returns in terms of

global stability and building a sustainable world.

Food security and nutrition: enabling aspects of education

Food security and nutrition play critical roles in educa-

tion and human development. Empirical evidence

shows that good nutrition is a prerequisite for effec-

tive learning. The interdependent linkages between

caloric intake, nutrition and cognitive and physical

development are overwhelming. School feeding is an

intervention that enhances the diet and increases the

energy available to a child. It targets micronutrient

deficiencies, which are widespread among school-age

children in developing countries and which increase

susceptibility to infection, leading to absenteeism

and impairing learning capacity and cognition.

4,5,6,7

Improving micronutrient status through food forti-

fication or micronutrient powders, particularly of

iron, B-vitamins, vitamin A and iodine, contributes

directly to enhanced cognition and learning capacity.

Recent studies in Kenya and Uganda proved that both

in-school meals and take-home rations (THR) reduce

anaemia prevalence.

8,9

There exists a large body of literature that demon-

strates a systematic link between physical trauma and

specific cognitive and learning deficits.

For instance,

stunting, which is typically caused by malnutrition and

insufficient caloric intake, has been found to be associ-

ated with reduced cognitive skills and slower progress

in school as a child, as well as reduced earnings as an

adult.

Food and nutrition security are the key ingre-

dients or even the enabling aspects of educational

development. Nutritious foods provide children with

the capability to function in the classroom.

Gender, orphans and vulnerable children

It has been proved that school feeding contributes to

improved education for girls, as both in-school meals

and THR are effective in targeting gender objectives.

This is particularly useful in boosting girls’ enrolment