When COVID-19 broke out in March 2020, schools everywhere closed almost overnight. All children lost out on education, and more than 370 million children also lost out on their daily school meal, which for many was their only guaranteed meal of the day.

Alongside the pandemic’s education crisis, another crisis emerged: with millions of children no longer receiving the proper nutrition at school, their well-being and ability to fulfill their learning potential were significantly impaired. For governments worldwide, it became clear that building back better from COVID-19 would require looking after the learner, as well as the learning.

Establishing the Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition

In October 2021, governments around the world formed the School Meals Coalition, launching immediate action to rebuild, improve, or scale up their national school meals programs.

To help with these tasks, the group of 76 countries, many of which are also members of GPE, called for the establishment of a Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition to provide independent, credible evidence and programmatic guidance for rebuilding national school meals programs.

By engaging thought-leaders across the world, the Research Consortium, with a secretariat based at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, set about creating and collating evidence covering every aspect of what makes a successful school health and nutrition program, with a focus on analyzing the costs, benefits, design and impact of programs in countries at all income levels.

In Helsinki in October 2022, at the first Ministerial Meeting of the School Meals Coalition, the Consortium presented a statement summarizing the evidence gathered in its first year.

Here are 5 things the evidence tells us so far…

1. Better learners = better learning outcomes

Providing school meals contributes to higher rates of school attendance, particularly in countries where girls’ participation in education has been traditionally low.

A new metric known as learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS), which combines both quantity and quality of education received, has been found to demonstrate that improving the health and wellbeing of the learner has benefits for learning in a similar order of magnitude to interventions which we already know to be effective, such as those promoting early child development, better qualified teachers and better classroom practices.

2. To invest in school meals is to invest in the future of society as a whole

The creation of human capital – the skills, knowledge and experience possessed by a population that contribute to the overall productivity of a nation – is essential for the development of all countries, and relies on a healthy, educated population.

Irrespective of income level, recovery from the pandemic, re-establishing the benefits of the school system and the health services delivered through this platform, including school meals, will be crucial to national development.

3. School meals are a social safety net

The response to the fuel, food and financial crises of 2008 included a substantial increase in the coverage of school meals and complementary school health programs in both high- and low-income countries, which was an immediate and effective way of reaching young people directly, becoming the most extensive social safety net in the world.

The COVID-19 school closures effectively prevented many of these programs from playing this supportive role in 2020, and largely undermined the social safety nets, though efforts were made by some countries to replace school meals with take-home rations.

Attempts to replace the programs with cash transfers had limited success but have spotlighted some key advantages of school meals and complementary school health programs: they benefit the targeted child directly; they offer subsidiary benefits for education, nutrition and well-being; and they stimulate the local agricultural and service economies.

4. In the face of an ongoing climate crisis, school meals can build resilience

Effective school meals programs depend on effective food systems, which in turn depend on effective agriculture. Too often the focus has been on the quantity and not the quality of food, yet the Global Education Forum 2022 estimates that more than 3 billion people have low quality diets.

School meals programs can help address this. At the same time, the programs provide stable, predictable markets for local farmers, who can then focus on local production, including micronutrient dense crops targeted at growing children, and supporting local cultural preferences and climatic realities.

This is a virtuous cycle that can help local economies thrive and promote food sovereignty, while encouraging local agrobiodiversity, which confers climate resilience.

5. School meals programs provide excellent value for money

Taking into consideration the wide-reaching, multi-sectoral and long-term benefits of school meals for society as well as for students, investing in school meals programs produces very high returns.

A 2020 study by the Research Consortium found that in low- and middle-income countries, an average of $9 was returned by investing $1 in school meals programs, a multisectoral return that helps explain why these programs are such a good investment in education.

A look ahead

The schoolchildren of today face an uncertain future. The long-term consequences of COVID-19 remain unclear and are compounded by the global hunger crisis and growing climate emergency.

A well-educated population is central to global development and ensuring the well-being of young people today is essential to creating a resilient population able to achieve its full potential tomorrow.

The Research Consortium is committed to helping policymakers and parliamentarians create national programs that ensure the well-being of learners creating a population that is ready and able to learn.