It’s costly to run school feeding programmes. But there are also potentially very large multi-sectoral returns.
Hundreds of millions of children worldwide attend class every day. With such a wide reach, schools can effectively deliver a vast array of interventions such as immunisations and hygiene education. They can greatly improve the health of the students, who will learn better as a result.
The COVID-19 pandemic showed how important school feeding programmes are in achieving equality in health and education. School closures pushed millions of children away from learning – numerous students dropped out. This means they were also excluded from the health, nutritional and developmental benefits of receiving a daily meal, as well as the social protection it affords.
The Research Consortium is charged with generating scientific evidence to guide the roll-out of effective national school health and school feeding programmes. One of its focus areas is quantifying the returns of these programmes across multiple sectors, including health, education, social protection and agriculture. To quantify the returns, it’s necessary to assess the programmes’ value for money, equity and gender impact.
We looked at the impact and return on investment in four sectors: health and nutrition, education, social protection, and the local agricultural economy.Return on investment Our analysis showed that school feeding programmes present high value for money, and can lead to very large multi-sectoral returns. There could be considerable variations between countries depending on local contexts like burden of disease, wages, the costs of feeding a child, and the extent of farming and inequalities.
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