Feeding futures: The importance of clean cooking for school feeding
Clean cooking is an essential, yet often overlooked, component of sustainable school feeding. This paper examines barriers, solutions, and SNV's experience transitioning school kitchens.
Abstract
School feeding programmes are a proven mechanism for improving child nutrition and educational outcomes, yet the environmental and health costs of how school meals are cooked remain largely unaddressed.
This paper examines the role of clean cooking technologies in making home-grown school feeding more sustainable, equitable, and cost-effective. With schools estimated to be the second-largest consumers of biomass energy after households, the transition to cleaner cooking solutions is both urgent and complex.
Drawing on SNV's 30-year clean cooking portfolio across 14 countries, the paper identifies key barriers to adoption—including upfront costs, infrastructure gaps, fragmented decision-making, and limited evidence—and outlines the enabling conditions required for scale. Case studies from Uganda and Kenya demonstrate that energy-efficient technologies can deliver reductions in fuel costs of over 60–90%, while improving working conditions for catering staff and reducing harmful emissions.
The paper argues that clean cooking must be embedded in integrated, systems-level approaches to school feeding by linking energy, agriculture, nutrition, and water to achieve the goal of reaching 10 million children with healthy meals by 2030.
For more information
please contact Monique Beun - Global Lead Food Security and Nutrition