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MOTIVATION
Food-for-education programs can help fight malnutrition and hunger while broadening access to primary education. From 2005 to 2007, IFPRI conducted a randomized study in northern Uganda primary schools to identify the benefits of school meal programs, which have been shown to improve children’s school attendance but can have mixed effects on nutrition outcomes.
OUTCOMES
Researchers found that the school meals programs were responsible for broad improvements in child education and nutrition outcomes. Children exposed either to onsite school meals or to equivalent take-home rations experienced improved school attendance and higher scores on cognitive development assessments. In addition, the program led to large reductions in anemia prevalence among the adolescent girls in the program and had positive spillover effects on other household members, reducing the anemia prevalence of adult women in the same households as well as of preschool children in one district where access to another source of iron supplementation was removed.
The study also determined that the timing of meals during the school day was not relevant to the positive effects, that take-home rations were generally as effective as onsite school meals, and that a combined program of onsite school meals and take-home rations could be used together for maximum impact.
