School feeding programs provide meals for children to encourage their enrollment, attendance and educational performance. These programs vary from the provision of breakfast, lunch or a midmorning snack, to a combination of these. They are often integrated with health and nutrition education, parasite treatment, health screening, and provision of water and sanitation.
Recent program experiences highlights that school feeding may be effective where alternative safety nets are limited. In such contexts, school feeding meets the needs of a vulnerable population group, offering a vital outlet to meet daily caloric intake requirements. However, substantial errors of inclusion may still occur and where school enrollment is low, school feeding can exclude the poorest.
The fiscal sustainability of school feeding programs is a critical design and implementation challenge. The associated costs of implementation tend to be relatively high. Food storage and transport add to administrative costs, including the well-trained staff and extensive supervision costs incurred for the preparation of food. The cost-effectiveness of school feeding programs is dependent upon the targeting method and implementation costs. For these reasons increasing attention is being devoted to scaling up affordable programs at scale and often at national level. Rethinking School Feeding:
Social Safety Nets, Child Development and the Education Sector  This joint publication of the World Food Programme and the World Bank Group examines the evidence base for school feeding programs with the objective of better understanding how to develop and implement effective school feeding programs in two contexts: as a productive safety net that is part of the response to the social shocks of the global crises, and as a fiscally sustainable investment in human capital as part of long-term global efforts to achieve Education for All and to provide social protection to the poor.
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