Home Grown School Feeding

This framework fosters the replication and scaling up of home-grown school feeding models and the mapping of opportunities for linking such programmes with relevant agricultural development and rural transformation investments.

This publication seeks to support practitioners by providing methodological guidelines for conducting rigorous impact assessments of Home Grown School Feeding (HGSF) programmes. It presents an overview of the main technical issues to be addressed depending on the characteristics of the context and of the intervention itself. While these guidelines are mainly designed for monitoring and evaluation officers working for United Nations agencies, local governments or non-governmental organizations, its contents can be of interest to a wider audience of policymakers, researchers and practitioners interested in multi-sectoral, complex programmes linking agriculture and nutrition.

This synopsis summarizes the content and structured process of the Resource framework and provide guidance on the main considerations and elements relevant for home grown school feeding programmes. This publication is intended to support policy-makers, development partners and governments, as well as civil society and community based organisations and the private sector to design, implement and scaling up school feeding models designed to provide children in schools with safe, diverse and nutritious food, sourced locally from smallholders. It is based on a comprehensive review, and wide consultations among the partner organizations at global, regional and country level, as well as with experts and members of various governments and relevant stakeholders at Global Child Nutrition Forums and other relevant venues for learning and policy dialogue. The Resource Framework is a knowledge product that harmonizes the existing knowledge and tools, and builds on the wealth of expertise of the partners. This publication is the result of a broad based collaborative effort initiated, coordinated and facilitated by the World Food Programme, involving collaboration of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the Global Child Nutrition Foundation, the Partnership for Child Development , the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development and the World Food Programme Centre of Excellence in Brazil.

Home Grown School Feeding (HGSF) programmes have seen a considerable growth around the world in recognition of their crucial role as boosters of children's health and educational outcomes, as well as of countries' overall growth potential through stimulating economic activities and developing markets through local procurement. School feeding programmes have been implemented in Ethiopia for 20 years. The scope of this report is to present the results of a 2019 baseline study of a HGSF programme implemented by the Government of Ethiopia. The impact evaluation, whose results are presented in this publication, was designed to capture the impacts of the HGSF programme on farm production, food security and schooling. The evalutation is based on a post-test-only, non-equivalent control group design, and on two rounds of data collection: the first took place in June – July 2019 at the end of the school year, while the second was planned forthe same period in 2020, but did not materialize owing to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Home-grown school feeding programmes have seen a considerable growth around the world. These programmes play a key role in supporting the improvement of child health and facilitating access to education, as well as in stimulating economic development through local procurement. The rigorous evaluation of the effects of these programmes on children and local economy poses several challenges due to the presence of multiple treatment arms,complex targeting criteria and the difficulties from lack of treatment randomization. This report presents the results of a simulation analysis of different food procurement modalities employed by Senegal’s current school feeding programme (SFP) by using local economy-wide impact evaluation (LEWIE). The LEWIE methodology was designed to capture both the direct and the indirect impacts of a wide range of governmental programmes and policies in local economies. The findings suggest that SFPs in Senegal have significant positive impacts on production and income within a 10-km radius of beneficiary schools. These impacts grow as SFPs increase their sourcing from local traders and food producers.

The aim of this study is to explore the distributional impacts on poverty and income of two programmes in Zambia, the Home Grown School Feeding (HGSF) programme and the Conservation Agriculture Scale-Up (CASU) project, complementing the impact evaluation findings by Prifti & Grinspun (2019). These programmes target different parts of the population but are partly overlapping; they aim to influence poverty and food security through different channels. In the World Food Programme (WFP)’s HGSF modality, school feeding or provision of free meals for schoolchildren is complemented with procurement of food used for the meals from local smallholders. The purchase scheme aims to provide market access for smallholders, hence improving income stability and incentives to invest, ultimately increasing their productivity and reducing poverty. The objectives of school meals alone are improvement in schoolchildren’s nutrition as well as improvement in school attendance and hence human capital accumulation. Conservation agriculture (CA) consists of production methods that reduce farmers’ vulnerability to climate risks and improve productivity. The CASU programme promoted the use of such methods among smallholders through training and demonstration and provision of inputs, aiming for adoption of more sustainable farming which increases farm productivity in the long run.

This in-depth qualitative study in Zambia is integral to a mixed method impact evaluation of the Home Grown School Feeding (HGSF) and the Conservation Agriculture Scale Up (CASU) programmes. Zambia’s HGSF (launched in 2011, and institutionalized in 2012, by the Government of Zambia in collaboration with the World Food Programme, WFP) provides nutritious cooked meals to almost one million schoolchildren and WFP’s Purchase for Progress (P4P) programme procures the commodities that make up the school meals provided by HGSF. P4P aims to improve livelihoods and address food insecurity by expanding local market opportunities for smallholder farmers in rural areas. The CASU programme (implemented between 2013 and late 2017 by FAO) aimed to provide solutions to declining crop production among small- and medium-scale farmers, strengthen partnership and networking between the Zambian government and cooperating partners, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the private sector, and reduce hunger, improve food security and income by increasing crop production, diversification and productivity. The aim of the qualitative study is to contextualise the findings of a quantitative impact evaluation conducted between October 2017 and January 2018, and deepen understanding of how and why specific findings and impacts transpired.

This impact evaluation report quantifies the impacts of Zambia’s Home Grown School Feeding (HGSF) programme – one of the country’s biggest social protection programmes – and the Conservation Agriculture Scale Up (CASU) project, both alone and in combination with each other. The report looks at how the programmes affected farm production and other livelihoods, the food security situation of the household and of school-going children and the educational outcomes of the latter. The report concludes that each programme or programme component considered in isolation meets their strictly defined objectives, but their combination leads to unintended conflicting influence on certain outcomes, thus highlighting the need for increased coherence between programmes. The household and community surveys for the evaluation of the programmes took place between October 2017 and January 2018. The total sample size is 3 636 households and a total of 72 community interviews were also conducted.