While the world is still facing multiple crises due to conflict, climate change, and rising food and fuel prices, governments worldwide are increasingly convinced that school meals are a powerful and cost-effective way of ensuring that vulnerable children get the food they need and have made school meals one of their priorities.
In 2022, WFP supported governments to establish or expand national school feeding programmes, while also directly providing healthy meals, snacks or cash-based transfers in 59 countries to more than 20 million schoolchildren, often using locally-produced nutritious food.
Of the total number of children participating under a WFP-supported school feeding programme in 2022, 9.6 million received school meals in humanitarian emergency settings affected by conflict or natural disasters.
In 56 countries, WFP supported the establishment or strengthening of home-grown school feeding programmes with the objectives of promoting dietary diversity, introducing fresh, local food into school meals, and linking national programmes to local smallholder production.
Throughout 2022, WFP has supported the School Meals Coalition, by acting as its Secretariat. The country-led Coalition aims at ensuring that every child has the opportunity to receive a healthy, nutritious daily meal in school by 2030. By the end of 2022, 74 countries and 81 partners had joined the Coalition.
In 2022, WFP also released the State of School Feeding, which demonstrated that political will is transforming into action: 418 million children now benefit from school meals worldwide, which is 30 million more than before the pandemic.
