Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition

Launched in May 2021, The Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition, led by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine, provides research evidence to policy makers.

• This initiative coordinates a 10-year research agenda for evidence-based decision-making on school health and nutrition.  
• It brings together global academia, think tanks, and research partners to generate evidence, make the case for investment, and provide policymakers in Coalition countries with programmatic guidance, particularly addressing the learning crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.  
• The Consortium continues to disseminate this evidence widely to enhance country decision-making and improve programme scale and quality.  

• Value for Money Study: Determines the value-for-money of school health interventions and their impact on education outcomes. It can provide evidence to establish and/or scale up school meal programmes.  
• Good Example Case Study: Documents how national programmes are organized, financed, and monitored. It will showcase your national programme for other countries to enable peer-to-peer learning between countries.
• Integrating national academics, policymakers and parliamentarians into regional and global school health and nutrition networks: The Research Consortium links together existing networks of thought leaders in the school health and nutrition space. Where no network exists, the Consortium will support the creation of new ones.
• Develop a research strategy through to 2030 to fill mission-critical knowledge gaps to support policy makers with strengthening national school health and nutrition policies and programmes: The Research Consortium has initiated various areas of research focus in response to specific requests by Coalition member countries. Research findings have informed additional and complementary areas of exploration, such as the role of home-grown school meal programmes in transforming diet and food systems. The Research Consortium will consult broad stakeholders on the research strategy through an iterative process and will specifically seek to include early career researchers and youth in decision making.
• Conduct and build upon impact analyses on the major outcomes of school meals and complementary health and nutrition interventions: The Research Consortium is undertaking a review of trials data using rigorous Cochrane Collaboration procedures to assess the effectiveness of various school meal interventions. These studies reprise and extend the analyses, last conducted in 2007, which determined the scale of impact of school-based health and nutrition programmes in terms of key outcomes, including education, cognition, health, nutrition and human capital.