“Stunted children today lead to stunted economies tomorrow. The most important infrastructure we must build is 'grey matter infrastructure,' the infrastructure that powers the brain and all human capabilities.”
Those are the words of Akinwumi Ayodeji Adesina, President of the African Development Bank, winner of the 2017 World Food Prize, and of the Global Child Nutrition Foundation’s (GCNF) 2017 Gene White Lifetime Achievement Award. Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS), Chairman of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee joined us in honoring Dr. Adesina at the 2017 GCNF award event; on March 7, the Senator will himself receive the GCNF Lifetime Achievement Award for his work on behalf of school meals, agriculture, and nutrition.
GCNF expands opportunities for the world’s children to receive adequate nutrition for learning and achieving their potential through school meal programs. We work to support country governments, especially low-income country governments, to start, expand, improve, and sustain nutritious school meal programs.
Why? Because school meal programs work. They work in powerful ways, and not just for children and their families. Their power comes from the entirety of the benefits, the integration of the three pillars of development (education, health/nutrition, and agriculture) within one program, the anchoring of the programs in schools, the involvement of all levels of society, and their intergenerational impact. They are investments in “grey matter infrastructure” and in economic development, helping families to survive and kids to thrive.
Just consider the impact of these programs in terms of jobs. School meal programs create jobs, many of which are for very vulnerable (and often rural) segments of the population: women, farmers, and youth. For example, in 2014 one of Nigeria’s 36 states—Osun State—reported that thousands of jobs had been created via their school meal program: women hired as cooks and assistant cooks; youth in fish and poultry production and processing, and egg sorting and packing. “Small farmers and off-takers” are linked to the program, plus cattle producers, transporters, and “other miscellaneous workers”. Osun State feeds about 250,000 children one meal per school day.
School meal programs also catalyze the private sector, by providing opportunities all along the supply chain, as the Osun State example illustrates. Transporters, processors, packagers, dishware manufacturers—a whole ecosystem of services and products wholly or in part based on school meal programs. This does more than create jobs. It builds a tax base, a food supply infrastructure, and a partnership between the government and private enterprises.
The need is great: In 2016, some 52 million of the world’s children under five suffered from “wasting” (acute malnutrition of short duration); 155 million children were “stunted” (suffering effects of chronic undernourishment). Meanwhile, about 41 million children were overweight in 2016. The United Nations estimated in 2014 that the combined burden of undernutrition and obesity cost the global economy $3.5 trillion per year!
Yet program coverage is weakest where the need is the greatest: In low-income countries, only about 18 percent of school children receive school meals. Most or all these countries rely on external support—such as that from the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program—the only significant US Government contribution to school meal programs internationally.
The need persists in the US, too: Share Our Strength reported in 2017 that 13 million children in the US are facing hunger—that is one of every six children! The report said that 59 percent of children from low-income families say they have come to school hungry; 75 percent of educators see children who regularly come to school hungry; 92 percent of the educators are concerned that hunger will impede their students’ ability to succeed; and teachers report paying an average of $300 per year out of their own pockets to buy food for students.
The US school lunch program covers about 30 million children in close to 100,000 schools; over 90 percent of those schools also provide breakfast, at a 2017 cost of just under $17 billion. Imagine the number of companies and jobs involved in our school nutrition programs! And think about whose jobs they are: school lunch ladies, farmers, and youth who find jobs related to the programs, as well as truckers, processors, packagers, food inspectors, and more.
US Government support for school meal programs is longstanding, bipartisan, and for many years, unwavering. There have been recent rumblings, however, regarding potentially dangerous changes to domestic school nutrition programs, and the McGovern-Dole Program is in immediate danger: The President’s Budgets for both 2018 and 2019 proposed eliminating the program. Congress acted to maintain the McGovern-Dole Program this year, but it remains at risk as the 2019 budget negotiations play out.
The issue is not really whether there is a need nor whether school meal programs are effective. The issue, rather, is political will.
GCNF and its partners can attest to the fact that the leaders of some of the poorest countries in the world are demonstrating unshakable support for feeding their young and vulnerable citizens at school. We hope that the leaders of the US will have the political will to support the nutrition of their own young and vulnerable citizens, and to help those countries with fewer resources to do the same.