Three themes in school-based programmes to keep an eye on in 2024
Simone Lombardini, Niamh O’Grady, and Astrid Zwager with Jonas L. Heirman, Florence Kondylis and colleagues working on the School-Based Programme Impact Evaluation Window*
School-based programmes are one of the most extensive social safety nets worldwide. What new themes are emerging from impact evaluations in this field?
The world is currently facing an unprecedented food security and malnutrition crisis triggered by conflicts, soaring food prices, shocks and climate change.
This has the potential to undo decades of progress. With an estimated 418 million children currently benefiting globally, school meals are one of the most widespread social safety nets in the world.
For many children, it represents the most nutritious — for some, the only — meal of the day. School meals also encourage the poorest families to send their children to school. Once in the classroom, school meals ensure children are well-nourished and ready to learn. Therefore, school meal programmes are crucial for promoting children’s health, nutrition, education, and learning, especially for girls.
At the same time, school meals are increasingly recognised as a key investment for governments to create a stable demand for locally produced food, support the creation of local jobs, and promote more sustainable food systems. If appropriately designed, procurement practices can promote greater demand for produce from small-holder farmers, stimulate crop diversity, and make communities more resilient to climate change.
With a reduction of financial resources available, there is a pressing need for rigorous evidence to inform programmes and governments on how to best design and implement these interventions.
WFP’s Office of Evaluation (OEV), in collaboration with the School-Based Programmes (SBP) division and World Bank’s Development Impact (DIME) department, launched the School-based Programmes Impact Evaluation Window in 2021. The window generates evidence to inform policy decisions on the trade-offs in school-based programmes’ designs, support programmes and governments to design and scale up their programmes, and contribute to the global evidence base for school meals.
In 2022, we shared our reflections and four lessons learned from the first year of launching the window. Two years later, we are excited to share three emerging cross-cutting themes from ongoing evaluations within the window that will help inform the selection and design of new impact evaluations in 2024.
1. Health and education systems
School meal programmes are multisectoral interventions and an essential component of health and education systems that contribute to achieving children’s outcomes. Approximately 41 per cent of children enrolled in primary school now have access to a free or subsidised daily school meal worldwide.
While there is already strong evidence that school feeding impacts children’s attendance, more evidence is needed on the impacts of such programmes on health, nutrition, human capital outcomes, gender, social protection, and social cohesion.
Evaluations conducted under this impact evaluation window help generate evidence that address remaining questions, such as difference in outcomes for girls, that are not sufficiently covered in past literature.
This window is also generating new evidence to better understand how school-based programmes can play an important role as a social safety net protecting boys and girls during shocks and seasonal fluctuation. We are using high-frequency data in impact evaluations in The Gambia and Malawi to explore whether the benefits of school feeding programmes vary throughout the year depending on seasonal fluctuations, shocks, and stressors.
Finally, the ongoing impact evaluations are exploring the impact and cost-effectiveness of school feeding interventions when delivered alongside complementary interventions. For example, in The Gambia, the impact evaluation examines interactions between school meals and an additional component aiming to increase teachers’ attendance to assess whether teacher presence can magnify the impacts of school feeding programmes on learning outcomes.
2. Sustainable food systems, local economies and climate adaptation
The global annual investment of US$48 billion in school meal programmes creates a huge and predictable market for food, offering an extraordinary opportunity to transform food systems. Impact evaluations in this window investigate the extent to which different procurement systems can impact the local economy (such as market prices, cooperatives’ sales, and farming practices, revenues and income).
Ongoing impact evaluations in Burundi, Malawi, and Jordan assess whether different procurement systems affect service delivery in schools, their relative cost-effectiveness, effects on the local economy, and whether the benefits of locally procuring food are greater than centralised procurement processes.
Climate-smart school meal programmes could be part of the vanguard of country efforts to support food systems and greater climate adaptation. School meal programmes can purchase local food and create a more stable demand for climate-resilient crops.
Moving forward, we will be actively exploring the right settings to assess the effectiveness of interventions supporting farmers moving towards more climate-resilient crops combined with school meal programmes, creating a stable market for such crops.
3. Optimisation and cost-effectiveness
In many countries, WFP’s role includes providing technical assistance to national governments to inform their transition and scale-up of national school feeding programmes.
Impact evaluations in Jordan, Guatemala and Burundi are providing evidence to inform government-owned national school meal programmes. They compare alternative procurement and delivery models, providing valuable evidence to inform how to optimise such programmes, and which set of interventions are most effective — and cost-effective — to reach its goals.
WFP is working in 30 countries in crisis and humanitarian settings, with around 40 million children in need of school feeding. While impact evaluations are already commonly used to generate evidence in development contexts, a literature review identified only three studies investigating the impact of school feeding in fragile or emergency settings. There is a pressing need for rigorous impact evaluation evidence to inform WFP interventions in humanitarian settings.
We aim to use this window to contribute with rigorous evidence to optimise interventions in conflict-affected, fragile, food-insecure, and humanitarian settings.
Moving forward
In July 2023 we launched a new call for country offices interested in joining the School-based Programmes window, and replace the ongoing impact evaluations finishing in 2024. We invited new WFP Country Offices to join the window and contribute under one or more of these emerging themes. By entering the window, WFP country offices will get the chance to build on the evidence generated by WFP and the global School Meals Coalition.
Get in touch if you are interested.
*Colleagues working on the School-Based Programme Impact Evaluation Window include Benedetta Lerva, Cox Bogaards, Dahyeon Jeong, Erin Kelley, Gregory Lane, Hannah Irmela Uckat, Minh Phuong La, Paul Christian, Roshni Khincha, Thiago De Gouvea Scot de Arruda, and all the colleagues from Country Offices, Regional Bureaus, and HQ’s School-Based Programmes.
