School Feeding Quality Standards for Programme Design and Implementation

The World Food Programme (WFP) case studies within focus on implementation of school feeding programmes in Afghanistan, Brazil, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lao PDR, Malawi, Pakistan and Uganda. Learning From Experience is an effort to garner and organize existing practices related to school feeding programmes. The overall objective is to inform the design and implementation of cost-effective, affordable, sustainable and scalable school feeding programmes. While the study draws mostly on WFP experience, the lessons are relevant to school feeding practitioners from governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), WFP and other international organizations as well as the global school feeding partners, stakeholders and donors.

The UN World Food Programme has 45 years of experience in school feeding. This analysis, Learning from Experience, has harvested existing knowledge on the topic, drawing from 134 evaluations, case studies, an ongoing consultation process and operational experience.

This comprehensive analysis leads to the new “gold standards”, eight quality benchmarks for school feeding: a) sustainability; b) sound alignment with the national policy framework; c) stable funding and budgeting; d) needs-based, cost-effective quality programme design; e) strong institutional arrangements for implementation, monitoring and accountability; f) strategy for local production and sourcing; g) strong partnerships and inter-sector coordination; h) strong community participation and ownership.