The United Nations’ Office of the Special Adviser on Africa (OSAA) has consistently underscored a simple but consequential message: home-grown school-feeding is not charity; it is a strategic, high-return instrument to accelerate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), shore up state legitimacy and buy time for deeper reforms. That claim comes at a fraught moment. Global progress on the SDGs is slipping, fragility is infecting whole regions, and millions of children are being pushed further from school and from good nutrition. The choice is stark: scale programmes that produce fast, measurable dividends, or risk a generation lost to hunger, ill-health and schooling gaps.
The broad context cannot be ignored. International monitoring shows the 2030 Agenda is losing momentum: according to recent United Nations reporting, only a small share of SDG targets have been delivered and most remain unmet; close to half of the 140 measurable targets are advancing slowly or are off track and many have stagnated or regressed since 2015. These headline findings are not abstract, they translate into billions of people missing essential services, rising humanitarian needs, and less space for governments to invest in long-term development. In short, the global development compass needs re-setting, and interventions that work across sectors should be elevated.
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The Weight Africa Carries
Africa’s experience in recent years crystallises why school feeding matters. The shocks of 2021–2023, pandemic aftershocks, higher global food and energy prices, and escalating conflicts pushed approximately 15 million additional Africans into extreme poverty in 2022. In conflict-affected settings the number of people needing life-saving health assistance rose by a quarter that year. Schools themselves have become frontlines: in the 2021–2022 school year more than 12,000 schools across eight African countries closed because of direct attacks, mass displacement and fear. Each classroom shuttered is a compound loss: learning foregone, future earnings diminished, and a visible signal of a state unable to protect basic public services. These developments sap legitimacy and widen the fissures that violent actors exploit.
Security data deepen the alarm. Armed conflict incidents increased across three of Africa’s five subregions, and a small number of countries now account for a disproportionate share of global terrorism-related deaths. Millions have been uprooted: internal displacement rose sharply, and continent-level estimates show displacement figures in the many millions. While the rest of the world has seen terrorist fatalities decline since 2015, Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced a worrying reversal with deaths in many areas rising sharply. Because so many conflict-affected states share land borders, some eighty frontier lines in total roughly 85 per cent of the continent’s population either lives in or neighbours a state affected by violence, making fragility a regional, not merely local, phenomenon.
What a School Meal Actually Delivers
Against this stacked crisis, home-grown school-feeding (HGSF) is exceptional because it bundles immediate relief with durable systems change. A daily nutritious meal improves concentration and attendance, reduces short-term hunger and helps protect children from the negative coping strategies families are forced into when food is scarce. Where procurement is local, school meals create predictable demand for smallholder produce, which in turn stabilises incomes, supports women’s employment (often as cooks or caterers), and strengthens rural markets. When governments visibly deliver these services, they rebuild a fragile social contract: citizens see the state acting in a practical, life-improving way. That combination of nutrition, education, economic stimulus and legitimacy is precisely why OSAA and development partners have placed HGSF at the centre of the School Meals Coalition.
The evidence on returns is compelling. Multiple authoritative reviews conclude that HGSF and school-based health and nutrition programmes generate very high social and economic returns, studies cited by the World Food Programme and the Education Commission estimate returns in the order of nine dollars of social benefit for every dollar invested, with variations by context. Those benefits flow through higher lifetime earnings for better-educated children, increased agricultural sales for smallholders, lower health costs and improved social cohesion. Framed bluntly, the cost of not investing in school feeding, lost human capital, deeper poverty, wider instability, far exceeds the price of expansion.
How Many Children are we Actually Reaching?
HGSF is not a theoretical fix: it already reaches tens of millions across Africa, but coverage is uneven. WFP and partner compilations indicate that home-grown programmes reached roughly 66 million children in more than fifty African countries in recent years; other surveys using different methodologies report higher totals (the Global Child Nutrition Foundation reports coverage that varies by year and method).
The key point is twofold: the continent has a substantial operational base on which to scale, and many children, especially in fragile and low-income settings still do not receive school meals. Crucially, most HGSF programmes are already domestically funded: WFP reporting suggests the majority of programmes are financed by national budgets, which demonstrates political ownership and the feasibility of a transition from aid-driven models to domestically sustained systems.
What Works and Where the Gaps Remain
Country experience provides practical lessons. Ghana’s long-running School Feeding Programme grew from a pilot to a national instrument that by the late 2010s covered more than a million children and employed tens of thousands of cooks—many of them women—while stimulating local markets for cereals, legumes and vegetables. The programme has improved enrolment and provided a market signal to smallholders; yet persistent challenges remain in payment delays, infrastructure and menu quality issues that point to the importance of financing predictability and stronger procurement and monitoring systems.
Rwanda’s national programme has emphasised decentralised procurement and school gardens, linking classroom nutrition to local production; evaluations by WFP and partners have highlighted gains in dietary diversity and local farmer inclusion while noting the investment needed to scale. Nigeria’s renewed National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme illustrates political scale: the ambition to reach millions of children requires rapid capacity building and linkages to smallholders across states. These country stories show that HGSF is operationally feasible but that scaling requires attention to logistics, quality standards and farmer support.
Financing the Expansion: A Two-Track Road Map
Scaling HGSF at the speed and depth Africa needs demands a pragmatic financing architecture. In the immediate term, additional Official Development Assistance should be mobilised and explicitly targeted at programme expansion and system strengthening: investments in kitchens, storage, digital procurement platforms, nutrition standards, training for cooks and accountability mechanisms are as important as the food itself. Evidence suggests that targeted donor financing delivers outsized returns if it is deployed to build durable capacities rather than only to bridge recurrent shortfalls. The short-term ODA push is therefore an enabling platform.
Concurrently, donors and governments must pursue a credible medium-term transition so that national budgets assume rising shares of programme costs within a five-year horizon. That requires making part of ODA conditional on domestic resource mobilisation and public financial management reforms that enable governments to embed school feeding in recurrent expenditure lines. Successful transitions already exist on the continent; the challenge is to scale their lessons while protecting coverage during the handover. Blended financing, debt-swap innovations and targeted earmarked taxes (for example on luxury goods) can provide complementary instruments, but they must be channelled into sustainable fiscal arrangements rather than short-term fixes.
Procurement, Nutrition and Climate Resilience
If HGSF is to be more than a stopgap, programmes must be thoughtfully designed. Procurement rules should favour smallholder aggregators and women’s cooperatives while ensuring quality standards that meet children’s nutritional needs. Complementary investments, extension services, climate-smart inputs, storage and market aggregation allow farmers to meet demand consistently and sustainably. Nutrition standards must be enforced so that menus deliver the macro- and micronutrients children need for learning and growth. Finally, as climate shocks multiply, programmes should promote locally adapted crops, diversify supply sources and invest in post-harvest loss reduction to keep meals reliable in droughts or floods. WFP and regional landscape analyses stress these design elements as essential for HGSF to generate both immediate and enduring benefits.
Risks and How to Manage Them
There are predictable risks: dependency on external aid, governance gaps that produce payment delays or corruption, and weak market readiness among smallholders. None are insurmountable. The evidence suggests that ring-fenced budget lines, transparent e-payments to caterers, independent monitoring, and phased co-financing arrangements substantially reduce those risks.
Where conflict disrupts supply chains, contingency arrangements, holding buffer stocks, identifying alternative suppliers and pre-positioning resources can sustain meals for the most vulnerable. Political commitment is the ultimate risk mitigant: where heads of state and finance ministers see HGSF as core to social policy, programmes stabilise and expand.
What Ministers and Donors Should Agree Today
Three concrete mutual commitments would change the calculus. First, donors should scale targeted ODA for HGSF system building (not only food procurement) and link a share of funding to DRM and PFM reforms. Second, African governments must adopt legal or budgetary instruments to ring-fence school-feeding finance and establish national procurement platforms that prioritise smallholders.
Third, regional bodies should coordinate cross-border supply chains and share best practices: when one country’s harvest fails, rapid regional procurement can prevent sudden interruptions to school meals. These steps would convert short-term wins into long-term stability and ensure that school feeding becomes a structural pillar of national development. The School Meals Coalition and WFP’s landscape analyses provide operational templates for such a compact.
Feeding the Future
The evidence and the lived reality on the continent converge on a simple, urgent conclusion: home-grown school feeding is one of the few instruments that delivers across education, nutrition, agriculture, fiscal policy and peacebuilding simultaneously. It buys time for governments to rebuild legitimacy, it creates economic opportunity in rural areas, and it protects children’s development in the moment when they are most vulnerable.
With credible short-term donor financing and a firm, time-bound transition to domestic funding, Africa can scale an intervention that is affordable, politically salient and measurably transformative. To walk away from that prospect would be to gamble with futures that are still salvageable. To keep betting on school feeding is to put a price on hope, and that is a price worth paying.
