For vulnerable families, the value of school meals can be equivalent to about 10 percent of a household’s income. Especially for families with several children, school meals can mean substantial savings.
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School meal programmes can increase enrolment by an average of 9 percent, while significantly increasing attendance rates and decreasing drop-out rates.

Per 100,000 children fed, approximately 1,377 jobs are created by school feeding programmes along the value chain, particularly benefitting female entrepreneurs.
‍4 million jobs have been directly created through school meal programmes in 85 countries.

Evidence suggests that well-designed school meals can reduce the prevalence of anaemia in girls by up to 20 percent.

When school meal programmes purchase food locally, they match quality diets to local production, increase local agro-biodiversity and strengthen local food sovereignty. This can support smallholder farmers, especially rural women and indigenous producers, and increase the availability of fresh foods for the whole community.

Climate-smart school meal programmes could be in the vanguard of country efforts to become more climate resilient by diversifying diets, aligning agriculture and procurement to local food sovereignty, and rethinking energy and farming practices. Local procurement of school meals also leads to shorter supply chains, resulting in lower carbon emissions and paving the way to a greener future.

Over the years, the focus of efforts to support school-aged children was primarily put on “learning” as a priority outcome, with much less attention paid to the “learner”. The “Biomarkers of Nutrition for Development: Knowledge Indicating Dietary Sufficiency: the BOND-KIDS Project” aims to fill the gaps in our understanding of how school feeding programmes impact children’s health and development via the amount and quality of dietary intake and subsequent nutritional status, and how to measure those outcomes. To support governments develop and implement nutrition guidelines and standards, which improve the nutritional quality, quantity and adequacy of foods and meals in school, FAO, WFP and BMEL have partnered on the project “Nutrition guidelines and standards for safeguarding schoolchildren and adolescents’ right to food”.

Together with the Rockefeller Foundation, WFP aims to scale up the consumption of nutritious foods, such as fortified wholegrain flour, for school-age children through leveraging school feeding procurement as an enabler for better nutrition outcomes. For example, fortified wholegrain for example addresses the need for affordable nutritious food to serve some of the most vulnerable populations, while maximizing the nutritional value per cost unit.