More than 150 million school children globally are still missing out on meals and essential health and nutrition services. This is largely due to the rampaging COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, the pandemic caused extensive disruption to schools and education worldwide.
As a result, millions of children were unable to get their school meals or benefit from school-based health and nutrition services such as deworming, vaccination and psycho-social support.
And, following pandemic-driven school closures, five United Nations agencies have thrown their strong support behind an international coalition to improve the nutrition, health and education of school-age children around the world.
In a joint declaration this week, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), World Food Programme (WFP) and World Health Organisation (WHO) committed to assisting the School Meals Coalition in which over 60 countries envision a nutritious meal in school for every child in need by 2030.
The School Meals Coalition is, however, an emerging initiative of governments and a wide range of partners to drive actions that can urgently re-establish, improve and scale-up food and education systems, support pandemic recovery and drive actions to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Led by France and Finland, the Coalition is also committed to “smart” school meals programmes that combine regular meals in school with complementary health and nutrition interventions for children’s growth and learning.
“School health and nutrition programmes are impactful interventions to support schoolchildren and adolescents’ growth and development”, the UN leaders said in their declaration, adding, “they can help to combat child poverty, hunger and malnutrition in all its forms. They attract children to school and support children’s learning, and long-term health and well-being”.
Noting that school children are not the only ones who benefit, the UN agency heads pointed out that the meals can serve as “springboards” for food system transformation.
And where possible, they can use locally grown food to support national and local markets and food systems, thus, improving opportunities for smallholder farmers and local catering businesses – many of which are led by women.
While WFP’s Executive Director, David Beasley, said “the School Meals Coalition has the potential to help countries recover from the COVID-19 crisis. School feeding programmes can get children back in school, fix the damage done to their education, create jobs locally and enable smallholder farmers to earn a sustainable living to feed their families”, these programmes can undoubtedly contribute to achieving at least seven of the SDGs.
Each of the five UN agencies will provide a specific set of expertise to the coalition, which includes more than 50 partners from non-Governmental Organisations to civil society and foundations.
The Coalition will work to restore the school meals and other health and nutrition programmes that were in place before the COVID-19 crisis, expand them to reach an additional 73 million children who were not covered before the pandemic, and establish standards to raise food quality while linking them to local food production, where possible.
The UN agencies have committed to work with governments to achieve the coalition’s goals by providing technical and operational support where needed and advocating for funding and better data on the impact of school health and nutrition programmes.
