In benefitting children and their families, school feeding and health help build what is known as ‘human capital’-the sum of a population’s health, skills, knowledge, experience and habits. Relieving parents from having to budget for lunches, they boost incomes and help to alleviate poverty-school meals represent 10 percent of the income of poor and vulnerable households, a significant saving for families with more than one child. School feeding programmes act as an incentive for families to enrol and keep children in school.
School feeding and health programmes empower girls by dissuading parents from marrying them off early, which halts their education and can result in child pregnancies. WFP is also a proud supporter of the School Meals Coalition, which aims at improving or restoring national, sustainable school meal programmes, to ensure every child has the opportunity to receive a healthy, nutritious meal in school by 2030.īetter health and nutrition allow children to learn and perform better, broadening their educational opportunities. Working with governments to build capacity, WFP helped bolster the national school feeding programmes of 65 countries, benefitting a further 39 million children. In 2020, 15 million schoolchildren received nutritious meals and snacks from WFP. WFP’s ultimate goal is to encourage and facilitate national government ownership of these programmes - a transition that has already happened in 48 countries. The World Food Programme (WFP) has six decades of experience supporting school feeding and health initiatives and working with more than 100 countries to set up sustainable national school feeding programmes. In conflict-affected countries, where children are twice as likely to be out of school than their peers in stable countries – 2.5 times more likely in the case of girls.
There are also millions of children-particularly girls-who simply do not go to school because their families need them to help in the fields or perform domestic duties. Every day, millions of children around the world go to school on an empty stomach-hunger affects their concentration and ability to learn.
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