UN announces launch of ‘ground-breaking’ school feeding analysis

UNITED NATIONS. KAZINFORM The United Nations announced the release of a major analysis of global school meal practices, which offers guidance on how to design and implement large-scale sustainable national school feeding programmes that can meet globally approved standards.

Produced by Imperial College London’s Partnership for Child Development (PCD), the World Food Programme (WFP), and the World Bank, the Global School Feeding Sourcebook: Lessons from 14 countries was created in response to demand from governments and development partners.

The Sourcebook documents and analyzes a range of government-led school meals programmes to provide decision-makers and practitioners worldwide with the knowledge, evidence and good practice they need to strengthen their national school feeding efforts.

With school meals’ proven ability to improve the health and education of children while supporting local and national economies and food security, WFP reported that school feeding programmes exist in almost every country in the world for which there is data, for a total annual global investment of $75 billion.

This provides an estimated 368 million children – about one in five - with a meal at school daily. However, too often, such programmes are weakest in countries where there is the most need, the UN agency warned.

With high-level collaboration with government teams from 14 countries (Botswana, Brazil, Cabo Verde, Chile, Cote D’Ivoire, Ecuador, Ghana, India, Kenya, Mali, Mexico, Namibia, Nigeria and South Africa), the Sourcebook includes a compilation of concise and comprehensive country case-studies. It highlights the trade-offs associated with alternative school feeding models and analyzes the overarching themes, trends and challenges which run across them.

Read more at The UN News Centre website