London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

As 2024 draws to a close, the Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition is thrilled to reflect on an impactful year in our mission to improve access to quality evidence and useful policy guidance on school meals. Across the globe, enormous progress has been made to support countries to design school meals programmes that have the potential to improve the health, wellbeing, and educational outcomes of millions of children - with evidence increasingly pointing to long-term positive effects across several sectors.

Here, we highlight six key areas that have driven progress in 2024:

1) Studies show that school meals offer excellent value-for-money

22 value-for-money studies analysing the multisectoral costs versus benefits of national school meals programmes are currently underway and eight have been completed to date, with reports on Ethiopia and Malawi published this year.

Led by our ‘Analytics & Metrics’ Community of Practice and working through regional economic research communities, these reports predict the long-term economic impact associated with the health, education, social protection and agriculture outcomes of each national programme. Across all studies to date, for every $1 invested in school meals, benefits of $7 to $33 could be expected. The studies also estimate that distribution of school meals would greatly improve equity, with school meals alleviating 5-8% of annual food expenditures for the poorest families.

2) Countries around the world share best practices in their school meals programmes

Case studies of national school meals programmes are currently underway in 48 countries, with 18 published to date. Seven new case studies were published by our ‘Good Examples’ Community of Practice in 2024, as part of our strategy to document best practices across all 106 countries of the School Meals Coalition. Using a common template, the case studies aim to document the organisation, financing and monitoring of national school meals programmes, with the latest studies coming from Benin, Burundi, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Togo and Ukraine. The analyses are written by teams of in-country programme specialists with the support of the Good Examples team, such as through regional writing workshops to bring together lead authors in respective regions to explore common successes and challenges within the process. All published case studies can be found on the Research Consortium’s Publications page.

3) Supporting direct policy action in Ukraine and the Philippines

The Consortium provided tailored support to several countries this year to inform government decision-making on school meals policy. In Ukraine, in support of the government’s intention to improve access to nutritious school meals during times of war, members of the Research Consortium co-authored a World Health Organization policy brief on expanding the national school meals programme, bringing together the evidence in support of the long-term benefits of universal free school meals programmes for countries rebuilding from crisis. The policy brief was complemented by a case study by the Good Examples Community of Practice, documenting the current school meals provision in Ukraine to help identify the path ahead towards scaling up to universal coverage. We attended the launch event for the case study in Kyiv, hosted by Ukraine’s School Nutrition Reform Office.

The Consortium also directly supported the Philippines in conducting a fast-tracked value-for-money analysis of their national school meals programme, helping the Ministry of Education to explore the evidence for the government to preserve and ultimately increase the school meals budget. Moving forwards, the Research Consortium will provide ongoing support to the MoE to strengthen national school meals data and monitoring systems.

4) Our Global Academy approaches 1,000 expert members

The Research Consortium serves as a global think tank on school meals, with the aim of providing quality evidence and useful policy guidance to all 106 countries of the School Meals Coalition and beyond. It is therefore mission-critical that the perspective of every country in the School Meals Coalition is represented within our global network of experts in school health and nutrition, known as our ‘Global Academy’. In 2024, great strides were made towards this goal and we are close to reaching 1,000 members in our network of researchers, policymakers and programme specialists – now representing 104 different countries across six continents.

The Academy encompasses individuals such as yourself with an interest in school meals from a diverse range of sectors, with each member offering unique expertise and vital perspectives that contribute to building the global evidence base on school health and nutrition. Encourage your colleagues to join our global community by signing up today!

5) Planet-friendly school meals continue to gain momentum

In 2023, the ‘Diet & Food Systems’ Community of Practice launched a seminal white paper at COP28 focusing on how school meals can support the transformation of food systems. This year, we continued to disseminate its key findings at global events such as COP29, as well as a forthcoming special issue in The Lancet Planetary Health. The first article in the series is now online, with other articles highlighting barriers, opportunities and evidence gaps in planet-friendly school meals programming and complementary policies to be published in early 2025.

Next year, the Consortium will be supporting Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda with policy planning for planet-friendly school meals by facilitating modelling analyses, case studies and data gathering in four key areas: menu design, food waste, modern energy cooking and food education.

In recognition of the global impact of our Planet-Friendly School Meals work, the research programme was selected for the longlist of the 2025 Food Planet Prize, the world’s biggest environmental prize rewarding initiatives that support a healthy planet while feeding the world.

6) Growing awareness of the multisectoral benefits of school meals

Evidence is increasingly pointing to school meals as far more than just a plate of food. While alleviating hunger is one advantage in certain contexts, this year has seen growing global recognition of the unique value of school meals for their multiplying benefits across several sectors, including:

Nutrition: Several professional nutrition networks announced their intention to establish special interest groups focusing specifically on school-age children for the first time, including both the African Nutrition Society and the Federation of African Nutrition Societies. This year also saw the publication of Global Health 2050 Report by the Lancet Commission on Investing in Health, which outlines the most effective health investments for governments to halve premature death by 2050 and includes a focus on the importance of addressing nutrition-based health challenges during childhood and adolescence, such as anaemia and development failure.

Education: A forthcoming Cochrane review “School feeding programs for improving the physical and psychological health of school children experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage” expands upon and reinforces the findings of a prior 2007 Cochrane review. This new review, which evaluated more than twice as many studies, provides additional evidence that school meals can be effective at improving some growth and educational outcomes—including enrolment and learning—among school children. Other studies similarly found that school meals yield positive impacts on education outcomes and are a comparatively cost-effective intervention, by leveraging the wellbeing that leads to investments in education. In the same vein, ensuring the wellbeing of the child was a key point of discussion at the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring meeting in November.

Social protection: School meals are recognised as the world’s most extensive safety net, serving 40% of the world’s primary school children, with a new discussion paper showing that school meals and cash transfers are complementary social protection tools with comparable effectiveness.

Agriculture: Five studies across sub-Saharan Africa are currently investigating pathways for school meals to drive sustainable food systems transformation, focusing on climate-smart foods and regenerative agriculture.