Scaling up School Feeding: Keeping Children in School While Improving Their Learning and Health

Overview

School feeding programs are 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. In response to increasing food and fuel prices in 2008, funds from the World Bank’s Global Food Crisis Response Program (GFRP) and the subsequent pilot Crisis Response Window (CRW) provided rapid assistance by supporting existing school feeding programs and essentially linking access to both food and education for poor and vulnerable children living in highly food-insecure areas.

Challenge

Every day more than 60 million children go to school hungry and in many countries, fewer girls attend school than boys. Research shows that providing in-school meals, mid-morning snacks, and take-home rations through school feeding programs can alleviate short-term hunger, increase children’s abilities to concentrate, learn, perform specific tasks, and has been linked to an increase in the enrollment of girls. These effects seem to be greater among children who are also chronically undernourished, usually the poorest children.

Low-income countries are expanding school feeding, because these programs help push them closer to reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by drawing more children, especially young girls, into the classroom. If these programs provide micronutrients such as iron, iodine, vitamin A, B-vitamins, and zinc through fortified foods and are combined with other school health interventions such as deworming, there may be additional benefits for children’s cognitive abilities and educational achievement.

Challenges for school feeding programs can range from their high operational costs to the need to build the capacity to procure food locally. In order for a country to have an effective school feeding program that focuses their resources on the neediest children, countries must: (a) determine if school feeding is the most effective social safety net option; (b) set program objectives and predicted outcomes, and determine administrative costs; (c) establish a system of effective targeting; (d) select the type of food to be provided in school, explore opportunities for local procurement and the feasibility of offering take-home rations through the program; (e) plan for school-level management, implementation, and monitoring of the ongoing school feeding activities; and (f) determine if complementary health and nutrition activities such as de-worming, supplementation, or fortification can be incorporated into the program to achieve additional benefits.

Approach

A joint review by the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Bank Group (WB), in 2009 Rethinking School Feeding: Social Safety Nets, Child Development, and the Education Sector, focuses on the key components to implementing successful programs and the need to mainstream school feeding into national policies and plans. This publication led to the WFP/WB Partnership on school feeding that benefits from the design, policy dialogue, and logistical expertise of both organizations. Joint action for assisting countries in planning sustainable school feeding programs and using cost and impact studies has occurred in seven pilot countries including Bangladesh and Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR).

In Bangladesh, the WFP distributes micronutrient-fortified biscuits as a mid-morning snack to more than a million children each day. As Bangladesh plans for a national school feeding program, the partnership has supported analyses on the program coverage, costs, and the investment case. As Lao PDR prepares for a smooth transition towards a National School Meals program in the coming years, the World Bank is acting as a supervising entity for the Education for All - Fast Track Initiative (EFA-FTI) funds needed to continue the program in 2010, while WFP is providing operational capacity-building support in terms of monitoring and exploring the feasibility of providing fortified rice noodles in the school feeding program.

Results

The World Bank, through the implementation of the GFRP and CRW, and by partnering with WFP and the EFA-FTI, has contributed to the following results:

• Targeting more than 60,000 pre-primary and primary school children through school feeding programs in five counties in South East Liberia in 2009.
• Extending school feeding as part of the response to the recent earthquake in Haiti through additional financing for the Education for All Project, which will help increase the number of school feeding beneficiaries from 75,000 to more than 200,000 a year.
• Launching the Home-Grown School Feeding Program in 2009, which initially fed 550,000 school children in Kenya and today benefits 1.9 million children. This program supports local farmers by providing stable and dependable local demand for their produce.
• Progressing toward the initiation of school feeding in four regions of Togo, with significant involvement by surrounding communities in 2009.
• Distributing 120,000 hot meals in 2009 to children in Burundi.
• Providing school meals to 14,000 students in 118 schools in Guinea-Bissau in early 2009.

Bank Contribution

In response to the financial crisis, increasing numbers of countries are using the GFRP and CRW trust funds to develop school feeding programs as social safety nets. Countries using the support in this way include:

• Burundi (US $10 million)
• Central African Republic ($7 million)
• Guinea-Bissau ($5 million)
• Haiti ($10 million)
• Liberia ($10 million)
• Nicaragua ($7 million)
• Togo ($7 million)

The WFP/WB joint action has also provided technical assistance to the governments of Cambodia, Kenya, Malawi, Togo, Bangladesh, Lao PDR, and Haiti in developing their school feeding programs. Through the EFA-FTI, multi-donor trust funds can provide school feeding and school health programs with transitional financial assistance once the education sector plans have been reviewed and the FTI process completed for that particular country. In the case of Mauritania, a contract of US$1.9 million was awarded to WFP for implementation of the school feeding program since it is a component of the Education Sector Development Program. Other EFA-FTI donors in Mauritania include Canada, the European Commission, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United Nations Development Programme.

Partners

Effective school feeding programs are executed as part of the national development policies of the implementing countries. In many cases partners also play a strong role which may include implementation.

• World Food Programme
• The Partnership for Child Development of Imperial College London
• Education for All-Fast Track Initiative
• Global Child Nutrition Foundation 
• International Food Policy Research Institute
• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• New Partnership for Africa’s Development/Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme
• Boston Consulting Group

Moving Forward

Besides being a social protection tool, school feeding is a continuing investment that can nourish children and decrease food insecurity while also contributing to the achievement of the first five MDGs. Bringing both girls and boys into schools and ensuring that they are free of hunger so that they can concentrate and focus on learning are critical steps in the education process. The WFP assists by reaching more than 22 million children in almost 70 countries. The global food crisis and the resulting GFRP and CRW are reminders that school feeding programs can be adapted and scaled up to reach the most vulnerable children in some of the most food insecure places in the world. In eligible countries, EFA-FTI funds can also be instrumental in the expansion of school feeding programs.

The successful transition of school feeding programs to sustainable country-owned programs depends on the mainstreaming of school feeding into national policies, especially education sector plans, national financing, and national implementation capacity. Local procurement of food is a possible means to achieve sustainable programs. It is critical that long-term sustainability is incorporated into programs from their inception, and that programs are continuously revisited as they evolve. As more and more governments seek to expand these programs in their countries, it is important to have more opportunities for knowledge sharing among developing countries that focus on ways to improve the procurement of locally available nutritious foods and compare best practices.

Beneficiaries

Ms Sandra Bodowa, an 11-year-old pupil at Ashongman D. A. Primary School in Ghana noted that many pupils from very poor homes went to school because of the food served, saying "What would have become of those great people if food had not been served in their schools?"