School Feeding

Key Documents
Country School Feeding Programmes
Bibliographies
Related Sites

School Feeding/Food for Education Stakeholders' Meeting,  2000

In October 2000, a School Feeding/Food for Education Stakeholders' meeting brought together fifty top practitioners and experts from USAID, USDA, the World Bank, UNICEF, the World Food Program, and ­­other organizations that either administer or implement school feeding programs. The purpose of the half-day session was to share observations and experience about best practices and lessons learned in the design and implementation of school feeding programs, especially in Africa, as well as to identify ways to make food aid “work” to benefit the children’s learning. 

These summary notes represent the dominant themes that arose at this stakeholders meeting, will be used to guide the UN Sub-Committee on School Nutrition as it develops its school feeding program strategy. The notes will also serve as a starting point for continued discussion among experts and practitioners and will form the basis for the development of guidance for use by USAID Missions and cooperating agencies. 

Background

Food aid has its roots in the disposal of surplus food in the post-World War II era. Public Law 480 (PL 480) was passed in 1954 to distribute this surplus to parts of the world still suffering from post-war shortages. Since that time, PL 480 shifted to a humanitarian focus in the 1960s dependent on Congressionally appropriated funds, and then to a three-pronged focus on food security in the 1990s, assisting to improve availability, access, and utilization of surplus food.

USAID developed a broad policy related to PL 480 funding in 1995, giving both a geographic and sectoral focus, but it was unclear how school feeding programs fit in. Not long after, nearly all standalone school feeding programs were discontinued because there was little evidence that they were having an impact on either nutrition or education. PVOs and NGOs continued to undertake school feeding programs, urging USAID to take a more flexible and varied approach. Under the resulting current policy, USAID is willing to consider funding school feeding and food for education programs if they are part of a larger national educational reform. There are currently programs in four countries in sub-Saharan Africa.  

The need for this meeting was realized six months previously when USAID’s Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance project (FANTA) began working on an indicators guide for school feeding programs. Through the indicators discussion it became clear that there was a need to develop and articulate the consensus that is emerging on several key issues related to the design and implementation of school feeding programs. The new U.S. Government school feeding initiative (Global Food For Education Initiative), which is about to launch a one-year, $300 million pilot school feeding program, increased the necessity and timeliness of the meeting.

Issues

There was no shortage of issues for participants to explore at this meeting. An initial list was presented by Don Bundy of the UN Sub-Committee on Nutrition. This was augmented by small group discussions, followed by a review by the entire group. These notes summarize the outcome of the presentations and discussions. The issues fell into two broad categories: the rationale for school feeding programs and programmatic lessons.

Lessons related to the rationale for school feeding programs

• Nutritional benefits. There is little evidence to suggest that school feeding programs have a positive impact on nutrition for participating children. In some instances, parents may provide less food at home, and the school meal simply replaces a home meal rather than adding food to the child’s diet. (There is some evidence, however, that providing breakfast rather than lunch could diminish this substitution effect.) In other instances, the food provided by the feeding program may not adequately address the complex nutritional deficiencies in the children’s diets (protein-energy malnutrition and lack of micronutrients). Also, the programs may be too irregular to have a meaningful effect on the long-term nutritional status of the children. On the other hand, there is some merit to the argument that in the most impoverished settings, even seemingly minimal, short-term efforts are worthwhile (food as a human right)—even though it is not clear that school feeding programs reach the neediest children.
• Impact on education and the link between hunger and learning. Much evidence suggests that children who are hungry or chronically malnourished are less able to learn, regardless of the setting. But the converse—that children in school feeding and food for education programs are better able to learn—only holds true when the food is accompanied by other inputs related to school quality.
• Impact on attendance. The evidence strongly suggests that school feeding programs can increase attendance rates, especially for girls. School feeding or take-home rations serve as incentives for enrolling children in school and encouraging daily attendance. This is likely a short-term solution, however, because if there is no change in the quality of schooling (or increase in intrinsic demand for education) attendance will likely drop once the food incentive is removed.

Programmatic lessons

• Relationship to education reform. School feeding must take place within the context of broad, national school reform programs. These reforms should focus on other essential inputs to education and learning such as teacher development, curriculum reform, and student assessment.
• Burden on governments and education ministries. National ministries of education should not be encouraged to “take on” school feeding at the expense of the other educational inputs, as it is difficult politically to refuse food aid. Many governments and education ministries are already struggling to manage barely functioning education systems and may not be equipped, financially or technically, to assume the additional burden of food distribution. (In fact, some models of school feeding programs would require over half of the annual per-pupil education expenditure in many sub-Saharan African countries.)
• Monetization. In most cases, some portion of the food commodities can be sold with the proceeds used for implementation of the program and other programmatic inputs. The current proportion of monetization relative to the total of school feeding and food-for-education programs is 15 percent worldwide (Congressionally mandated). The degree to which commodities should be monetized depends on many factors, including the impacts on the local economy and food production. However, for food to have any impact on learning, additional monetary inputs are required—food has to be accompanied by additional resources (see above section on relationship to education reform and following section on complementary inputs).
• Working through communities. Getting the community involved from the beginning, and giving them ownership of school feeding programs greatly increases the chances for the program’s success and sustainability. Parents easily see the need for feeding their children and want to help. Communities can assist in the planning of the program as well as the preparation and distribution of meals.
• Complementary inputs. To overcome the reliance on outside food sources such as school feeding programs, it is necessary to focus on complementary health and nutrition inputs to accompany the school feeding. Examples of these are nutrition and health education in the schools or communities. Also, other complementary interventions, such as micronutrient supplementation and deworming, are highly encouraged.
• Exit strategy. This is a key concern for donors. Sustainability can most readily be assured by working through communities, as governments simply do not have the financial resources to sustain feeding programs after donor support is withdrawn, and very few governments are committed to school feeding programs over the long term.
• Targeting. There is evidence that providing national coverage is not cost effective for national school feeding programs. Targeting the most underserved, food insecure areas, with relatively low rates of school attendance (where the reason for lack of attendance is related to lack of income and not lack of a facility) seems to make the most sense. Regional coverage is often necessary to avoid children transferring to schools as a result of the school feeding. Within the selected regions, girls can be specifically targeted with take-home rations. Areas particularly hard hit by HIV/AIDs could also be targeted.
• Testing innovations. There should be room to design food-for-education programs as true pilots, with the flexibility to test new methods of food delivery. USAID/Haiti, for example, has been experimenting with nutrient-rich snack biscuits made from surplus grains, which reduce the need for cooking and other preparations at the school and also provide micronutrients.

Key Documents

Food for Education: Experts Seminar - Reviewing the Evidence. World Food Programme, Rome, 8-9 May 2006.  Download seminar report

School Feeding Programmes: Improving effectiveness and increasing benefit to education. A guide for programme managers.  Joy del Rosso, 1999.

School-based feeding programmes: A good choice for children?  A key informant and literature review, David Hay, July 2000.


Bibliographies

bibendum


Related Sites

The Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and others have produced a number of documents relating to School Feeding and other Food Assisted Education Programmes.  These documents can be downloaded as Adobe Acrobat files, and are available from the CRS web site publications page, under Education Programming Publications.

Feeding Minds, Fighting Hunger: an international classroom for exploring the problems of hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity.

Latin American School Feeding Network, La-rae.net

The Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance Project (FANTA) has further materials, including a Food for Education Guide.