Global School Feeding Sourcebook

Abstract

School feeding programs are gaining increasing recognition for their twin roles as a long-term social protection investment as well as acting as a productive safety net for children and their families in the short-term. This was the conclusion of an analysis undertaken by the World Bank and the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), in collaboration with the Partnership for Child Development (PCD), with the aim of understanding why so many poor countries were using school feeding programs as a key part of their response to the emerging food, fuel, and financial crises of 2008. The analysis, published as Rethinking School Feeding (Bundy et al., 2009), showed that governments viewed school feeding programs as providing multiple benefits to education, to health, and to local agriculture, and as being important and readily expandable mechanisms to reach the most vulnerable. Whether called ‘school food’, ‘school meals’ or ‘school feeding’, these programs met most of the important criteria for a productive safety net. This Sourcebook is the third analysis of school feeding by the same three partners, and was produced in response to demand from governments and development agencies for operational guidance on the operational experiences of national programs. This analysis uses a standardized approach to provide a more in-depth understanding of individual programs from 14 different countries, and then to compare their case studies to see what lessons can be learned. The following 14 countries were selected to provide diversity in geography, approach, and development: Botswana, Brazil, Cape Verde, Chile, Cote d’Ivoire, Ecuador, Ghana, India, Kenya, Mali, Mexico, Namibia, Nigeria, and South Africa.