School meal programmes are thought to improve dietary behaviour in children, with benefits sustained throughout the life course, making them important catalysts for wider food-system change. However, only one in five children globally currently receives school meals.
School meal programs are a widely implemented safety net with documented impacts across social protection, education, health and nutrition and high estimated returns to investment (Alderman et al., 2024).
Public policies often aim to improve welfare, economic injustice and reduce inequality, particularly in the social protection, labour, health and education sectors. While these policies frequently operate in silos, the education sphere can operate as a cross-sectoral link.
Since its launch in 2011, 59 governments have used the World Bank’s Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) policy tool to design their national school-based health and nutrition programs.
With over 400 million children reached worldwide, school meals are among the largest-scale social protection interventions.
Children are the most vulnerable to the intersecting crises of poverty, hunger, poor health and education, and climate change. Hundreds of millions of children live in poverty and malnutrition; 240M of them are out of school, and 1B are at high risk from the climate crisis.
This is an invited memo prepared for the Spring 2022 Meeting of the Global Education Forum. It addresses the importance of the condition of children as a determinant of education outcomes, and specifically the role of school meals in addressing the well-being and learning of schoolchildren.
In the first few months of 2020, 1.5 billion children worldwide were excluded from schools by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Coverage of School Health Monitoring Systems in China: a Large National Cross-Sectional Survey” by Yan et al. provides an important demonstration of the value of monitoring national school health and nutrition programs.
School health and nutrition (SHN) interventions are among the most ubiquitous public health investments and comprise a key mechanism for reaching populations that are otherwise difficult to reach through the health system.