Global Survey of School Meal Programs
Description
School meal programs—in which students receive meals, snacks, or take-home rations—reach over 400 million children throughout the world. They aim to address multiple objectives, most commonly to improve children’s nutrition and health and to meet education goals by facilitating and incentivizing children’s school attendance and learning. Yet despite their prevalence and evidence of impact, the data available on large-scale school meal programs have historically been fragmented and inconsistent, making it difficult to discern trends over time or compare school meal activities across different settings. Advocates, policy makers, analysts, and practitioners have all confronted the same challenge: a scarcity of comprehensive and standardized information on school meal programs. The Global Child Nutrition Foundation (GCNF)—supported by an array of international partners and partially funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture—has sought to address this oversight through the Global Survey of School Meal Programs©. The Global Survey was launched in 2019 to gather information about school meal programs from national governments in every country in a standardized manner, and it has been repeated every 2-3 years. The survey is designed to be completed by a country “focal point” who is officially appointed by their government to liaise with the necessary entities to gather information for the survey and government approval for the information submitted. This survey dataset spans a broad set of topics of relevance to school feeding, including coverage/reach, targeting of beneficiaries, menu composition, food procurement and distribution, sources of funding, program governance, links to local agriculture and the private sector, and health and sanitation complementary services. It also tracks impacts over time, including the effects of shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, to support comparison across countries, inform investments, and enable research and advocacy. The dataset enriches the broader literature on school feeding and provides a starting point for further research on this topic. For more information about the data, please visit https://gcnf.org/global-survey/.
Files
Steps to reproduce
In each survey round, the Global Survey of School Meal Programs© has gathered detailed information on school feeding activities worldwide, including the scope of school feeding in each country, budgets, and food provision, among other topics. The survey includes both closed- and open-ended questions. An invitation to participate in the survey is extended to each country government, which in turn appoints a national-level respondent (termed the survey “focal point”) to gather information on each large-scale school meal program operating in the country. This innovative survey design has produced the world’s most comprehensive and standardized dataset on school feeding. The questionnaires can be found within the data package and also at https://gcnf.org/global-survey/.
Institutions
- Global Child Nutrition FoundationWashington, Seattle
Categories
Funders
- United States Department of AgricultureGovernment of the United States of AmericaDistrict of Columbia, WashingtonGrant ID: FX18TA-10960G002
- United States Department of AgricultureGovernment of the United States of AmericaDistrict of Columbia, WashingtonGrant ID: FX22TA-10960G001