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 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.

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.

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.

Food and nutrition security is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals enshrined in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In an attempt to contribute to reaching this objective, school feeding programmes are serving meals to over 418 million pre-primary, primary and secondary schoolchildren around the world. The positive experience from a project supported by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Angola, Honduras and Peru that incorporated locally procured fish into home-grown school feeding (HGSF) programmes led to the elaboration of this toolkit. This toolkit is designed to support governments, project designers, managers and practitioners involved in the fishery value chain and school feeding, who want to incorporate locally procured, safe, nutritious and affordable fish and fish products into their existing HGSFs. Therefore, this toolkit is expected to assist them during the rapid assessment of the situation of the school feeding and fishery sector, and the identification of challenges and opportunities present while incorporating fish and fish products into HGSFs. To this end, this toolkit adopts three main approaches: the Sustainable Food Value Chain for Nutrition to enhance the consideration of nutrition lens in the value chain approach; the gender-transformative approach to support women fisherfolk in their activities and increase their participation in school feeding programmes; and local and inclusive food procurement to connect public demand for food to small-scale fisherfolk. Specifically, this toolkit proposes 4 phases and 15 flexible and adaptable tools to sustainably serve fish and fish products at schools.

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.

'The School Food Revolution is an important book that deserves success.'Journal of Organic Systems 'A great new book that describes how 'the humble school meal' can be considered as 'a litmus test of... government's political commitment to sustainable development.'Peter Riggs, Director, Forum on Democracy & Trade'The School Food Revolution should be an inspiration for policy makers and for school heads and school canteen operators.'Tom Vaclavik, President, Organic Retailers AssociationSchool food suddenly finds itself at the forefront of contemporary debates about healthy eating, social inclusion, ecological sustainability and local economic development. All around the world it is becoming clear - to experts, parents, educators, practitioners and policy-makers - that the school food service has the potential to deliver multiple dividends that would significantly advance the sustainable development agenda at global, national and local levels. Drawing on new empirical data collected in urban and rural areas of Europe, North America and Africa, this book offers a timely and original contribution to the school food debate by highlighting the potential of creative public procurement - the power of purchase.The book takes a critical look at the alleged benefits of school food reform, such as lower food miles, the creation of markets for local producers and new food education initiatives that empower consumers by nurturing their capacity to eat healthily. To assess the potential of these claims, the book compares a variety of sites involved in the school food revolution - from rural communities committed to the values of 'the local' to global cities such as London, New York and Rome that feed millions of ethnically diverse young people daily. The book also examines the UN's new school feeding programme - the Home Grown Programme - which sees nutritious food as an end in itself as well as a means to meeting the Millennium Development Goals.Overall, the book examines the theory, policy and practice of public food provisioning, offering a comparative perspective on the design and delivery of sustainable school food systems. The cover illustration is by a Roman child. The authors would like to thank the City of Rome (Department for School and Educational Policies) for permission to reproduce it.