Gardens play a fundamental role in school feeding programmes, since they function as a strategic tool for food and nutrition education (FNE), contributing to the formation of healthy and sustainable eating habits for students and the entire school community.
Schools are crucial for promoting healthy diets and nutrition. The school nutrition environment encompasses opportunities to ensure students receive nutritious foods and accurate messages about good nutrition, supported by relevant services and education on healthy practices.
Rwanda’s National School Feeding Programme has expanded rapidly within very few years. Based on the National Comprehensive School Feeding Policy of 2019, the programme provides hot meals to all students in all public or government-supported pre-primary, primary and secondary schools since 2020.
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.
The Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) provides public primary school pupils with a free daily meal. Each meal is expected to follow set menus, providing 30% of children’s’ (6-12 years) energy requirements.
This summary brings together evidence from 49 WFP-commissioned independent evaluations, which cover the period 2018-2023 and were rated ‘satisfactory’ or above by WFP’s external post hoc quality assessment (PHQA).
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.
Taking into considerations risks of malnutrition and opportunity to address the issues amongst school-age children, particularly given the rising double burden of malnutrition, additional investment to prevent undernutrition and overweight amongst this target group is required.
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.