By Rachel Cole, Intern with the Council's Global Food and Agriculture Program
In 2008, the World Bank published a report citing School Feeding Programs (SFPs) as one of the highest area priorities for people living in low-income countries. SFPs seek to provide food to children as they enter primary school and are generally implemented in one of two modalities: through in-school meals or take-home rations. Through these provisions, SFPs create a social safety net for beneficiaries and their families by targeting the most vulnerable in a population, alleviating hunger, and tackling barriers which hinder the poorest from pursuing education.
SFPs have been criticized for creating a motivation structure in which children attend school solely as a means to the external incentive of food, and for establishing dependency on unsustainable systems. Still, if food as an incentive brings children to school, then, consequently, they will reap the benefits of education. SFPs are, at base, beneficial; through the World Food Program (WFP)’s SFPs, 17.4 million school children were fed in 2015. Ultimately, it seems that the criticisms of SFPs, generally made from afar, can be addressed, and should be.
Therefore; we must ask, how can SFPs be formulated in order to support food and nutrition security in an ongoing, self-sustaining manner? The aforementioned report found citizens want SFPs to act as more than social safety nets; they want self-sufficient and sustainable programs. Rather than continuing to frame SFPs as charitable aid interventions, we need to figure out how communities can develop their own programs and fuel those programs to become drivers of nutrition security and economic development.
Enter Home Grown School Feeding (HGSF) programs. HGSF programs employ the basics of traditional SFPs with the added goal of supporting local agriculture by using domestically-produced food—particularly that produced by smallholder farmers.
WFP has been providing school meals for 45 years in emergency, protracted relief, and recovery and development contexts. WFP presents the lessons of this 45-year history as 8 benchmarks for quality programming including cost-effective design, strong institutional arrangements, local sourcing strategies, inter-sector coordination, and community ownership. All of these have brought us to HGSF programs, which have the potential to be self-sustaining and domestically-run. These lessons indicate programs must be embedded in national policy frameworks with a deep understanding and commitment at the decision-making levels of government. While SFPs are recognized for benefits such as providing a safety net, alleviating hunger, supporting education, increasing attendance, reducing grade repetition, et cetera, HGSFs have additional potential to support local agriculture, reinforce food and nutrition security, and boost economic development.
HGSF programs also have the potential to target gaps in nutritional support that go unaddressed by traditional SFPs. According to UNICEF, childhood undernourishment has basic, underlying, and immediate causes ranging from socioeconomic contexts to household food insecurity to inadequate dietary intake and disease. Consequently, starting SFP interventions as children reach school-age is not enough. Early childhood development (ECD) interventions, providing nutritional meals to children before they reach school age, particularly within the first thousand days before a child turns two years old, are necessary and will enhance the benefits of SFPs. While traditional SFPs are proven to have spillover effects benefiting the younger siblings of program beneficiaries, including increasing height and weight, ECDs are not generally within their programmatic scope. HGSF addresses this gap in nutritional support by increasing smallholder farmer production, boosting local economies, and allowing families to escape the cycle of household food insecurity. Ultimately, boosting local economies means more disposable income for families, which they can then spend on food for their children well before they reach school age.
Additionally, HGSF programs have the potential to establish nutrition security at a community level. While meals may only be provided to school attendees, using biofortification (naturally-enriching staple crops) in local production can allow for whole communities to benefit from the added vitamins and nutrients simply by eating the staples already incorporated into family diets. Biofortified foods can address the micronutrient deficiencies which are responsible for about half of all preventable maternal and child deaths each year. Furthermore, biofortification of staples offers a relatively low-cost, cost-effective, and sustainable method for providing individuals with needed micronutrients, especially women and children who run the highest risk of micronutrient malnutrition. In this way, HGSF provides a type of ECD intervention by supplying micronutrients to expectant mothers and pre-school aged children.
The possibilities of HGSF programs are vast and more data are needed to better implement and scale-up programs. Still, the benefits of this type of intervention are already apparent. A 3 year impact evaluation (funded by Dubai Cares, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, and the Government of Ghana), looking at the agricultural and nutritional benefits of HGSF in Ghana, found increased agricultural incomes for smallholder farmers and improved educational opportunities, especially for girls.
In order to successfully scale HGSF projects, it is vital for government ministries to work together. Ministries of Education cannot carry the burden alone, especially as support in agricultural procurement, such as training in climate smart practices, is vital to the success of these programs. Policies should be put in place in order to ensure follow through. Even broad policies, such as those implemented earlier this year in Ghana, create guidelines, strategies, and an institutional framework. If HGSF programs are successfully scaled, then we have a real chance at achieving food security worldwide, driven by sustainable, local enterprise.