Gambia

Member since

August 2021

268.51K

Total children receiving school meals

428.05K

Children enrolled in primary school

2.66 Million

Total investment in school meals (USD)

Figures reflect the latest available data from the State of School Feeding Worldwide report, national reporting and global sources. Governments may update data more frequently, so values may differ from most recent national statistics. Reference year, source and further details are available in the School Meals Coalition Global Database.

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National Commitments

Commitment submitted on
October 2022
Declaration signed by the Ministry of Basic & Secondary Education

• Scale up home grown school feeding programmes to cover all public schools in the Gambia by the year, 2030 and empower mothers' clubs and other relevant stakeholders to effectively implement home grown school feeding programmes.
• Create a fiscal space to maintain an incremental school feeding budget line that will always adequately support all vulnerable children at any given time.
• Re-introduce regular deworming under the school feeding programme to intensify the nutritional health of children.
• Adopt a broad-based multisectoral approach for the implementation of the Home-Grown School Feeding Programme and create strong linkages between the production/supply side (Ministry of Agriculture and smallholder farmers) and the demands /school meals delivery side (Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education), while endeavoring to support and enhance the capacities to deliver, of both sides of the equation.
• Increase and strengthen capacity at the national School Agriculture and Food Management Unit. Streamline the human resource and organizational structure and institute and maintain a national multi-stakeholder steering committee to effectively support quality school meals planning, implementation and monitoring for greater success.

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National Progress Reports

Reporting year

Resources

Paper

School Meals Financing

Innovative Financing for School Feeding

Supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, this report outlines practical, country-informed solutions to overcome financing barriers that limit school meal coverage. It explores how governments can mobilize new and additional resources—such as taxing unhealthy products, leveraging climate finance, and earmarking natural resource revenues—to sustainably expand national programmes. The report makes the case that innovative financing is not only possible but essential to ensuring every child’s right to nutritious food in school.

Paper

Emergency Response & Recovery Health & Nutrition

A Positive Consequence of the COVID-19 Pandemic: How the Counterfactual Experience of School Closures is Accelerating a Multisectoral Response to the Treatment of Neglected Tropical Diseases

This research paper explores how the interruption of school-based health services during the COVID-19 pandemic, including deworming programs, highlighted the importance of these services. It discusses the acceleration of multisectoral approaches to combat neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), with school closures acting as a catalyst for global efforts in health and education recovery.

Bundy DAP, Schultz L, Antoninis M, Barry FBM, Burbano C, Croke K, Drake L, Gyapong J, Karutu C, Kihara J, Lo MM, Makkar P, Mwandawiro C, Ossipow SJ, Bento AR, Rollinson D, Shah H, Turner HC. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B; 2023.

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