Home Grown School Feeding 

A key part of the Partnership for Child Development's work is the Home Grown School Feeding (HGSF) initiative - which supports government action to deliver cost effective school feeding programmes across sub-Saharan Africa.  The project will promote local agricultural development and will benefit local livelihoods by using locally-sourced food, providing regular orders and a reliable income, the majority of whom are women, while improving the education, health, and nutrition of children.

Find out more about HGSF at www.hgsf-global.org

Supported in part by a new $12 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the initial five year programme will aim to improve the lives of smallholder farmers through developing stable access for their produce for these school feeding programmes.

A social safety net

The current food, fuel and financial crises have highlighted the importance of school feeding programmes, both as a social safety net for children living in poverty and food insecurity, and as part of national educational policies and plans. Appropriately designed school feeding programmes have been shown to increase access to education and learning, and improve children’s health and nutrition, especially when integrated into comprehensive school health and nutrition (SHN) programmes.

School feeding programmes also provide an opportunity to benefit local farmers, producers and processors by generating a stable, structured, and predictable demand for their products, thereby building the market and benefiting the wider local economy.

Engendering national and local ownership

HGSF provides direct, evidence-based and context-specific support to governments to design and manage school feeding programmes sourced with local agricultural production. 

Part of PCD's work on the HGSF initiative is to examine country readiness and key operational trade-offs, benchmarks, and good practice on how HGSF can most effectively stimulate local agricultural production, boost local and regional food production and create jobs and profit-making opportunities in rural communities. For more information on this work, please visit the Learning, Monitoring and Evaluation page and sub-pages of the HGSF website.  

The project is driven by New Partnership for Africa’s Development’s (NEPAD) vision for nationally owned, sustainable programmes aimed at improving smallholder farmers' food security. 
Through the funding and matching funding provided by this grant support has been mobilised to HGSF in at least 10 sub-Saharan countries, which contribute to the following goals:

• Improving smallholder farmer income through structuring market demand from HGSF programmes.
• Improving nutritional status, nutrition quality and quantity amongst smallholder farmer produce.
• Improving education, health and nutrition of school age children through sustainable and cost-effective school feeding programmes.

The in-country demand for smallholder production for local school meals has so far translated into sustainable, nationally-owned, cost-effective HGSF programmes (implemented to varying degrees) in the following countries: Ethiopia, Mali, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and Tanzania.

The three main focus areas:

1. The current state of HGSF - why is it implemented, how is it funded, how is it positioned in the political and administrative framework in the country, what are the capacity gaps and bottlenecks encountered at the country level, how is it governed, and what is needed to improve the quality of the programmes on the ground?
2. Strengthening partnerships and coalitions with key stakeholders for sustainable, in-country driven HGSF- promoting the cooperation and coordination between the wide range of stakeholders, including the recipient countries, donors, implementing agencies and the private sector;
3. Strengthening the current knowledge base - to review the existing evidence base (including gaps and priorities), develop planning, monitoring and evaluation tools, and to disseminate examples of best pratices. 

Linking school feeding with agricultural development A multi-sectoral approach is vital to the success of HGSF, to enable this the HGSF initiative will provide guidance, technical support and in-country partnerships on agricultural development and food security issues in country teams active in the initial five pilot countries (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Malawi, Mali). The group's aim will be to ramp-up country level activities and feed their findings into the development of a general HGSF monitoring and evaluation framework.

Key Resources

Bundy DAP, Burbano C, Grosh M, Gelli A, Jukes M and Drake L. 2009.
“Rethinking School Feeding: Social Safety Nets, Child Development and the
Education Sector”. Directions in Development, World Bank, Washington DC.

Espejo F, Burbano C, & Galliano E. 2009. “Home-grown school feeding: A
framework for action”. United Nations World Food Programme, Rome

Journals

• School Feeding; Outcomes and Costs
• The costs and cost-efficiency of providing food through schools in areas of high food insecurity
• On the transition to sustainability: an analysis of the costs of school feeding compared with the costs of primary education

HGSF Working Papers

• A review of nutritional guidelines and menu compositions for school feeding programs in 12 countries
• Linking school feeding with agriculture development
• HGSF linking small holder agriculture to school food provision

These are just a few of the HGSF resources, for all of HGSF's publications visit the HGSF Resource Bank.