Home Grown School Feeding 

The Partnership for Child Development has launched a new project that will support government action to deliver cost effective school feeding programmes in sub-Saharan Africa.  The project will promote local agriculture and benefit rural farmers by using locally-sourced food, providing regular orders and a reliable income for local farmers, the majority of whom are women, while improving the education, health, and nutrition of children. 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.

Download the press release

A social safety net

The current food, fuel and financial crises have highlighted the importance of school feeding programs 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 programs 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) programs.

School feeding programs 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

The project will support the delivery of cost effective school feeding programs that promote local agriculture and directly benefit small holder farmers. It will provide direct, evidence-based and context-specific support to governments to design and manage school feeding programs sourced with local agricultural production.

The project will examine country readiness and key operational trade-offs, benchmarks, and good practice, and how Home Grown School Feeding (HGSF) can most effectively stimulate local agricultural production, boost local and regional food production and create jobs and profit-making opportunities in rural communities.

The project is driven by New Partnership for Africa’s Development’s (NEPAD) vision for nationally owned, sustainable programmes aimed at improving small holder farmer food security.  Through the funding provided by this grant and matching funds mobilized for support to home-grown school feeding in at least 10 sub-Saharan countries, PCD anticipate that by 2014 the project activities will have contributed to the following goals:

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

The project and its associated activities will ensure that the in-country demand for small holder production translates into a sustainable, nationally-owned, cost-effective HGSF program.

There are 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 - review of existing evidence base (including gaps and priorities), develop planning and monitoring and evaluation tools, disseminate examples of best pratices. 

Linking school feeding with agricultural development

To enable the multi-sectoral approach which is vital to the success of HGSF the project will establish an agricultural technical consortia (ATC)  to provide guidance, technical support and in-country partnerships on agricultural development and food security issues. 

The ATC's work will be driven by 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.

Further reading

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