Publications and resources

This brief highlights the role of school meals in emergencies in supporting learning, reducing dropout risks, strengthening local systems, and contributing to long‑term recovery and social cohesion in fragile settings.

This briefing paper explores how health taxes on tobacco, alcohol and sugar-sweetened beverages can unlock additional domestic financing for school meals and school health programmes across Africa. It highlights the significant untapped fiscal potential of health taxes and demonstrates how redirecting a portion of these revenues could expand access to school meals, strengthen school health and nutrition programmes and support complementary investments such as water, sanitation and hygiene in schools. It presents evidence on financing gaps, outlines the triple benefits of health taxes for governments and includes country simulations from Burundi, Kenya and Uganda illustrating how tax reforms could mobilize resources to expand school meal coverage.

This advocacy brief highlights the powerful role that school meals play at the intersection of nutritious meals, clean water and hygiene for children and their communities. Countries continue working to secure sustainable financing, improve infrastructure and better integrate education, health, nutrition, agriculture and water policies.

Children spend a large share of their day in school, making it a critical setting for shaping lifelong dietary habits and reducing health and nutrition inequities. Yet the foods available, served, sold or promoted in and around many schools often include products high in saturated fats, trans-fatty acids, free sugars and salt, and are not aligned with national dietary guidance.

This WHO guideline provides evidence-based recommendations and implementation considerations on policies to improve school food environments. It covers three areas: direct food provision in schools; nutrition standards or rules for foods and beverages served or sold at school; and nudging interventions that modify the school food environment to promote healthier choices.

The recommendations aim to increase the availability, purchase and consumption of foods and beverages that contribute to a healthy diet, and to reduce the presence and consumption of those that do not. The guideline emphasizes that foods and beverages provided, served, sold or consumed at schools should be safe and support healthy diets, in line with children’s rights and national public health goals.

This study looks at the cost-benefit analysis of Niger’s National School Feeding Program (PAS), which provides nutritious meals to primary school children. It quantifies the programme’s multisectoral benefits, including improved educational outcomes, better health and nutrition, and reduced rates of anaemia. The programme also generates substantial social protection benefits by lowering household food expenditures and stimulates local economic development through the procurement of locally sourced food. 

Overall, the analysis demonstrates that the programme delivers a strong return on investment, generating significant benefits across the education, health, nutrition, social protection, and agricultural sectors.

This school meals case study forms part of a collection led by the Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition’s "Good Examples" Community of Practice. The School Meals Case Study of Ghana serves to document how the national school meals programme is organized, funded, and monitored throughout the country. The objectives of this case study include presenting an introduction to the country profile, outlining the design and implementation of school feeding programmes, describing their monitoring and evaluation processes, and highlighting lessons learned, best practices, and challenges. 

Addo, P; Kushitor, K; Mawuli, K M; Gyinde, A; Ester Gaba, D; and Zotor, B F (2025) School Meals Case Study: Ghana. Working Paper. London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London. DOI: 10.17037/PUBS.04673395

This advocacy brief positions school meals as climate-smart investments. It showcases how programmes in Brazil, Kenya, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bangladesh are advancing climate action through local food sourcing, clean cooking, and resilient supply chains. The brief calls for stronger integration of school meals into national climate policies and financing strategies, emphasizing their role in delivering co-benefits across education, nutrition and sustainable food systems.

Cambodia has implemented school feeding activities since the late 1990s, with staggered adoption across ten provinces and with varying components, including on-site meal provision and takehome rations ; and a home-grown school feeding (HGSF) program has been piloted since 2014.

Schools can be an effective platform for delivering key interventions. For example, school feeding programs (SFP) represent a school-based intervention that can efficiently target vulnerable populations, including children from rural areas, poorly performing schools, and regions presenting with high food insecurity.

This study looks at School meal provision in Cambodia and how it can generate important multisectoral benefits, along the sectors of education, health and nutrition, social protection, and local agriculture economy. While important variations in the extent of benefits were estimated across provinces, the school feeding program remains cost-beneficial in all regions of Cambodia.