Supporting parliamentary action for school meals

School meals: A toolkit for parliamentarians

School meal programmes are a proven and scalable way of supporting children’s health, improving their education and providing an essential safety net by protecting household incomes. The benefits of these programmes extend to the agricultural and climate sector, and evidence finds they can boost social cohesion and gender equality.

Key to growing the reach and improving the quality of school meal programmes is increasing parliamentary knowledge of and commitment to school meals.

As a result, the International Parliamentary Network for Education with the support of the World Food Programme and Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition,  has produced ‘School meals: A toolkit for parliamentarians’.

The toolkit provides members of parliament with the evidence to make the case for school meals along with actionable advice and guidance.

The toolkit has three key parts:

(1) An introduction to school meals 

Part one provides an introduction to school meal programmes including how meals can be provided and funded.

(2) The case for school meals 

Part two sets out the overwhelming evidence that school meals programmes offer exceptionally high returns on investment along with the potential for large-scale benefits across a range of priority policy areas.

(3) Actionable advice and guidance 

Part three of the toolkit explores how members of parliament can exercise their core responsibilities to expand and improve school meal programmes domestically and if relevant, as an international development endeavour.