Final Forum document in Japan outlines priorities, highlights progress, challenges, and actions to transform food systems.
Brasília, Brazil, January 16, 2025 – The Global Child Nutrition Forum (GCNF) has released an official communiqué outlining priorities to improve school feeding programs worldwide. With the participation of 408 representatives from 82 countries, the final document from the Forum, held in Japan in December 2024, highlights progress in program quality between 2022 and 2024, its contribution to transforming food systems, and the need to strengthen more sustainable and resilient systems.
The document aims to support the goals of the School Meals Coalition (SMC) and the Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit, reinforcing global collaboration around child nutrition. It identifies challenges and enablers for advancing school feeding programs. Below are some of its highlights:
There are things that hinder or prevent governments from maintaining or improving the quality of their school meal programs, including:
- Insufficient intersectoral coordination and collaboration
- Unstable funding.
- Limited infrastructure (such as adequate kitchens, storage spaces, and transport)
- Home-grown school feeding is not always an available option due to limited supply of quality food, due to a number of factors
- Climatic shocks make it difficult to produce all the foods needed for local purchases. Limited capacity of actors across value chains
- Absence of national laws, policies and standards on the involvement of smallholder farmers and farmer cooperatives in school feeding programs.
- Limited monitoring and evaluation systems to generate evidence and monitor progress
- Significant turnover of government officials
- Lack of nutritionists/dieticians dedicated to the program to help ensure nutritious and balanced meals.
There are things that help governments improve the quality of their school meal programs, including:
- Multi-sectoral collaboration and coordination between ministries of education, agriculture, health, finance and others to ensure a comprehensive approach. This can also include:
- Establishing an intersectoral system for managing the school feeding program.
- Joint advocacy for school feeding legislation that engages parliament and local councils.
- Ensuring coordination at the national, provincial & local levels.
- Sustainable government financing through a dedicated school feeding budget.
- Developing a national school feeding sustainability strategy along with a work plan with performance indicators.
- Additional funding streams dedicated to school feeding that are included in education and agriculture laws.
- Capacity building and technical assistance for actors across the value chain, including smallholder farmers and school feeding staff.
- Developing public-private partnerships across the value chain.
- Training local farmers to improve their production capacity.
- Community participation that involves parents, teachers, supervisors, communities, &farmers to guarantee that the program responds to the local needs & traditions.
Government school meal programs already contribute to food systems transformation in the following ways which should continue to be supported and scaled up:
- Connecting schools with nearby farmer organizations through “Farm to School” schemes, supplying local produce to schools.
- This ensures a steady supply of locally produced food and creates secure markets for farmers.
- To support this, central governments can provide funds directly to schools to make local purchases as well as provide advance financing to farmers, encouraging them to increase production with guaranteed demand.
- Another model is to engage women’s farmer organizations which can generate financial opportunities for local women.
- Thismodelcan encourage farmers to adopt more sustainable practices through the tendering process, by championing fresh and organic local produce in schools.
- Investing in improvements in transporting fresh food is an important consideration.
- Developing school gardens to introduce nutritious foods to children and increase meal diversity.
- Promoting local and traditional culture and cuisine on school meal menus to help students increase their appreciation for nutritious local food.
- Popularizing alternative sources of fuel for clean cooking.
For governments-led school meal programs to further support food systems transformation, the following should be prioritized:
- Increase community-led processing facilities to support local food processing.
- Develop certification guidelines for local products to facilitate local procurement.
- Foster young agriculture entrepreneurs to become healthy food champions.
- Promote underutilized fruits and vegetables on school menus and kitchen gardens.
- Support indigenous and other smallholder farmers to increase local productivity of climate resilient crops.
- Engage nutritionists in the classroom and streamline nutrition education throughout the school meal program.
- Governments need the following from partners to implement high-quality school meal programs:
- Greater collaboration with the private sector, especially aggregators to increase local processing.
- Technical assistance for evidence generation and enhancing national research capacity. Other issues that governments feel need attention in the coming year include:
- Conducting return on investment analysis for their school feeding programs.
- Decreasing turnover of school cooks, by increasing salaries and setting a minimum wage clause for this work.
- Amplify voices on the importance of social inclusion and gender equity in school feeding.
Role of RAES
The Sustainable School Feeding Network (RAES) participated in the Forum in Japan, sharing its experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean. Represented by institutions such as the Brazilian Cooperation Agency (ABC), the National Fund for Educational Development (FNDE), and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), RAES highlighted the region’s advancements in school feeding.
Najla Veloso, coordinator of the Regional Agenda for Sustainable School Feeding project and executive secretary of RAES, stated: “The Latin America and Caribbean region has become a global reference in school feeding. It is crucial to occupy these spaces to share our progress and learnings with the world.”
RAES’s participation was instrumental in exchanging information, gaining insights, and drawing inspiration for the growth and improvement of school feeding programs in the region and beyond.
