Rethinking School Feeding: Social Safety Nets, Child Development, and the Education Sector

By D. Bundy, C. Burbano, Margaret E. Grosh, A. Gelli, M. Jukes, L. Drake. 2009

409 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This review highlights three main findings. First, school feeding programs in low-income countries exhibit large variation in cost, with concomitant opportunities for cost containment. Second, as countries get richer, school feeding costs become a much smaller proportion of the investment in education. For example, in Zambia the cost of school feeding is about 50 percent of annual per capita costs for primary education; in Ireland it is only 10 percent. Further analysis is required to define these relationships, but supporting countries to maintain an investment in school feeding through this transition may emerge as a key role for development partners. Third, the main preconditions for the transition to sustainable national programs are mainstreaming school feeding in national policies and plans, especially education sector plans; identifying national sources of financing; and expanding national implementation capacity. Mainstreaming a development policy for school feeding into national education sector plans offers the added advantage of aligning support for school feeding with the processes already established to harmonize development partner support for the education for all-fast track initiative.

Subfields: Nutrition and Dietetics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fe6c47f70edd688c82e2accd96164690c31365d2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Nutrition and Dietetics

1. M. Ruel
2. M. Qaim
3. Kibrom T. Sibhatu
4. Derek Headey

In Safety Research

1. R. Sabates‐Wheeler
2. J. Sumberg
3. M. Ruel

Citations in the corpus

• Food insecurity and conflict dynamics - Causal linkages and Complex feedbacks* (2013, background): “In El Salvador, for example, a school-feeding programme was started during the civil war in 1984 and over a 24-year period, WFP supported capacity development, from the institutional framework and oversight to logistics, procurement and the design of the food basket (Bundy et al. 2009).”
• Value Chains for nutrition (2011, background): “Although evidence of the impact of these programs on farmers is limited (Bundy et al. 2009; Ahmed and Sharma 2004; Vaitsman and Paes-Sousa 2007), these avenues of availability are potentially important for specific at-risk groups.”
• Linking agricultural development to school feeding in sub-Saharan Africa: Theoretical perspectives (2011, background): “This paper has focused primarily on the agricultural development aspects of the HGSF, leaving the social protection side – the presumed benefits to children’s nutrition, health and schooling – unexamined (but see, e.g. Bundy et al., 2009).”
• Food Sovereignty and Fome Zero: Connecting Public Food Procurement Programmes to Sustainable Rural Development in Brazil (2017, neutral): “Globally, the assessment of targeted food procurement programmes has focused primarily on child nutrition and educational attainment through regular access to healthy and nutritious foods in the school context (Bundy et al. 2009, 2013; Bundy 2011; Alderman and Bundy 2012).”