Five shifts that will reshape school meals in East and Southern Africa

By Monique Beun, Global Lead Food Security and Nutrition, SNV and Brenda Mareri, Regional Program Manager Africa, HarvestPlus Solutions

In 2024, between 638 and 720 million people faced hunger globally, 73 million of them children. The WFP State of School Feeding Worldwide 2024 records 466 million children reached by school meal programmes, 80 million more than in 2020, with global investment doubling from US$43 billion to US$84 billion. Ninety-nine per cent of that investment is now domestic. Yet universal coverage remains far from reach. In low-income countries, international donors still fund 63% of school meal costs. In lower-middle-income countries, the donor share has grown from 9% to 20% between 2022 and 2024. In East and Southern Africa, government allocations fall below real costs, nutrition quality is variable, and supply chains are weak. Five structural conditions explain the gap.

Under the School Meals Coalition, more than 100 governments worldwide have committed to improve their school meals programme, many targeting universal coverage by 2030. WFP has formally shifted toward technical assistance rather than direct delivery, a recognition that sustainable school feeding must be nationally owned and nationally funded. In East and Southern Africa, most programmes still depend on donor funding or parental contributions, and government allocations are consistently below delivery costs.

Between 2021 and 2024, Rwanda‘s budget for school feeding increased from US$6.25 million to US$73.4 million, covering 90% of food costs for pre-primary and primary students. However, this allocation is based on 2020 food prices. Parents are formally expected to contribute 10% of meal costs, leaving a funding gap of around 40% of the real cost of a meal. The Rwanda National School Feeding Programme Financing Strategy confirms that even with both contributions combined, schools do not receive sufficient funds to purchase the required quantities and quality of food. This gap is absorbed through smaller portions, poorer quality meals, or gaps in delivery.

A true-cost analysis of Kenya's school meal programme found the real per-meal cost is nearly five times the government's official allocation. The preliminary findings of  HarvestPlus Solutions’ Quick Scan landscape analysis confirmed this pattern across seven countries. Communities cover the majority of actual costs through unpaid labour, donated firewood, and contributed food. This burden falls disproportionately on women in low-income households, whose contributions do not appear in any government budget line. The community financing model also creates a direct exclusion risk: families who cannot contribute are often those whose children need school meals most. A solidarity financing model, where all households contribute based on capacity, would treat school feeding as a public good rather than a private parental obligation. Most governments are negotiating financing reforms against a cost figure that excludes the majority of what delivery actually costs. The investment case must also be made more explicitly: school meals are not a budget line in education but a multi-sectoral investment in human capital, local economies, and food systems. Ministries of Finance and donors are unlikely to increase allocations until that case is clearly argued and the returns are documented.

Biofortified crops, including iron beans and vitamin A maize, trade at price parity with conventional varieties across the seven countries where HarvestPlus Solutions conducted a market assessment as part of their work to strengthen supply chain mechanisms for these crops. Schools could deliver up to 80% of a child's daily iron requirements by substituting biofortified staples into existing menus at no additional cost. The Copenhagen Consensus estimates a return of US$17 for every US$1 invested in biofortification. Demand is high across all seven countries. The constraint is supply: fragmented value chains, near-total absence of centralised aggregation outside Zambia, and weak seed-to-school corridors. Only Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zambia have moved biofortification into specific national procurement frameworks.

HarvestPlus Solutions has reached over 1.2 million learners with biofortified meals across 1,327-plus schools in Kenya, Tanzania, and Malawi by treating biofortification as a systems intervention. Drawing on experience from Zambia, participants at the regional school feeding webinar noted that sustainable biofortification requires formalised procurement, strengthened seed supply chains, and public-private partnerships developed in parallel with biofortification targets.

Burundi increased local food procurement from 50 to 264 schools between 2023 and 2025, injecting US$3.6 million into local economies. Across East and Southern Africa, comparable scale is rare. Imported food undercuts local producers not because of price alone, but because procurement systems, payment mechanisms, and aggregation infrastructure have not been built to include smallholder farmers and cooperatives.

The Procurement Governance for Home Grown School Feeding project, implemented across Ghana, Kenya, and Mali, showed that smallholder exclusion was not due to farmer capacity, but to how procurement systems were designed. When procurement was adapted, more than 21,600 farmers were able to access school feeding markets for the first time.

In Rwanda, SNV has linked 75 farmer cooperatives to school markets through the WFP Farm to Market Alliance. In Kenya, the IKEA Foundation-funded Veggies for Planet and People, connected over 3,000 farmers to school kitchens through 56-plus aggregators supplying Food 4 Education. In Burundi, WFP engaged SNV to replace imported UHT milk with locally sourced milk from smallholder farmers, through transparent procurement and consistent quality control. This has resulted in a practical framework that can be applied across multiple value chains, at country or at regional scale.

In Rwanda, 94.9% of schools use firewood. The SMC Research Consortium has identified clean cooking, WASH, and food storage as critical to programme quality. When classified as operational expenditure, clean cooking competes with food budgets. As capital investment, it unlocks carbon finance, energy sector funding, and private sector co-investment. This reclassification requires Ministries of Finance and national planning commissions to engage directly, not only Ministries of Education. A national Clean Cooking Task Force, co-chaired by the Ministry of Education and WFP, has been established, with SNV appointed to lead the institutional clean cooking strategy and develop an implementation roadmap from 2026.

Without temperature control during transportation, at aggregation points, and at schools, perishables such as milk, eggs, and green vegetables cannot be safely handled or reliably supplied. The Power for Food Partnership with the IKEA Foundation is piloting renewable energy-powered food storage and processing in Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, and Ethiopia to address this gap.

These five conditions are connected. Accurate cost data is the prerequisite for realistic financing. Financing determines what infrastructure gets built. Infrastructure determines whether aggregation is possible. But infrastructure alone is not enough — procurement systems and payment mechanisms must be designed to include smallholder farmers. Only then does local procurement become viable. And only then does biofortified food reach the plate. Closing these gaps requires Ministries of Finance and national planning commissions to treat school feeding as a multi-sectoral investment, not a line item in an education budget. Without a coordinating system that can hold the full picture, each condition will continue to be addressed in isolation, and the gap between policy and plate will remain.

This article draws on findings from the webinar 'Navigating the School Feeding Landscape: Trends, gaps, and partnerships', convened by SNV and HarvestPlus Solutions on 13 March 2026, with presentations from WFP and partners across East and Southern Africa.