Educational performance and canteen programs in Burkina Faso: is there any link?

Education has been recognized as a crucial driver of development throughout the history. This study evaluates the link between nutrition and student academic performance in mathematics and reading using the propensity score matching (PSM) method. First, we examine the relationship between nutrition and student outcomes and then present the PASEC (Citation2019a) database and the method used in our study. The results show that benefiting from school canteens improves student performance in reading by 22.47 points and mathematics by 29.46 points. This effect was more pronounced for boys and kindergarten students. In conclusion, scaling up school canteen programs represents a promising strategy to improve primary education in Burkina Faso.