Launch of the Global School Meals Coalition [fr]

The President of the Republic, Mr. Emmanuel Macron, participated in the launch of the School Feeding Coalition held on 16 November, in an online ceremony. During his speech, he highlighted France’s main commitments to school feeding at the national and global levels.

The President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mr Tshisekedi, in his capacity as Chairperson of the African Union, the Finnish Minister of Development Cooperation and Foreign Trade, Mr Ville Skinnari, and the Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), Mr David Beasley, along with eleven Heads of Government, also spoke at the virtual event.

In addition, several ministers, members of international organisations and civil society actors took the floor to present the benefits of school meals: increasing school attendance, contributing to gender equality, improving students’ health, teaching good nutritional habits, supporting local producers, reducing food insecurity, helping concentration in the classroom, and more broadly investing in the country’s human capital.

An ambitious coalition

Presented at the UN Summit on Food Systems in September 2021, this coalition, initiated by the World Food Programme (WFP) and led by France and Finland, brings together 61 countries as well as 50 partners (including UN agencies, NGOs, think tanks and academic partners). Its ambition is clear: to give every child in need the opportunity to receive a nutritious meal at school by 2030.

A real movement was born in 2021, largely because the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted how vital school meals and school health and nutrition services are to children, their families and their communities. It is now also widely recognised that these programmes have significant transformative potential.

This initiative also builds on decades of work by many organisations active in research, advocacy and programme implementation around the world. Discussions at the Food Systems Summit took this work to the next level and positioned it as an important multi-sectoral programme for post-Covid recovery, human capital development, and education and food systems transformation.

Initiatives launched in 2021

The School Meals Coalition will help partner countries scale up their school meals programmes, while addressing gaps and bottlenecks. As part of this effort, a number of initiatives have already been launched this year that aim to help governments expand and improve their school feeding programmes. These initiatives include:

• A Research Consortium: A research consortium was launched in May 2021 and is being led by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The consortium will coordinate the efforts of academia, think tanks and research partners, with a focus on the global south. It will establish a 10-year research agenda to build evidence for the impacts of school meals at large and to specifically focus on the worsened learning crisis expected as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Evidence will be disseminated widely to support decision making and improve scale and quality of programmes

• A Multisectoral Financing Task-force for School Health & Nutrition: The fiscal capacity of low-income countries for school meals and school health is the most important challenge to the scale-up and transition to national school meals programmes. A task-force has been established under the leadership of the Global Education Forum to improve donor coordination, the efficiency of current funding arrangements, help countries increase their fiscal capacity through innovative solutions, and marshal the resources necessary to address this global challenge.

The launch of the coalition is just the beginning. The work to make the coalition’s goals a reality begins now and will last until at least 2030.