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Building a global financing coordination mechanism for sustainable school meals

Children receiving a midday meal at a school in Jharkhand, India. (Photo credit: Mohammad Shahnawaz/Shutterstock)

This memo addresses the case for a new financing coordination mechanism with a remit to align and mobilize additional financing in support of national efforts to expand the reach and improve the quality of school meal programs. The note draws on research carried out by the Sustainable Financing Initiative for School Health and Nutrition (SFI) of the School Meals Coalition, looking at sustainable and innovative financing for school meals.

The challenge

The world stands at a critical juncture in its quest to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). At the current pace, the international community “is fighting a losing battle to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, which include the eradication of poverty, zero hunger, and quality education for all.” The Political Declaration adopted at the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) in September 2023 stressed that “progress on most of the SDGs is moving much too slowly or has regressed below the 2015 baseline.” The attainment of the SDGs faces significant threats in what the United Nations describes as the current “age of polycrisis.” Intersecting crises such as poverty, hunger, inequality, educational disruption and poor learning, climate change, conflict, and health shocks—most notably the COVID-19 pandemic—have not only stalled but, in many cases, reversed hard-won gains in SDG implementation. The most vulnerable segments of society—children from low-income families, women, and smallholder farmers—bear the brunt of these interconnected crises.

The 2024 State of Food Security and Nutrition report projects that by 2030, about 582 million people will be chronically undernourished, with more than half of them in Africa. Women, children, and smallholder farmers will comprise a sizeable contingent of this 2030 projected population. Among school-aged children (5-14 years), 186 million currently live in extreme poverty, 143 million are undernourished, and 392 million face moderate or severe food insecurity.

The polycrisis has also disrupted access to and quality education. COVID-19-induced school closures have resulted in large-scale learning losses, affecting 1.6 billion students globally. It has also exacerbated the global learning crisis, with the percentage of ten-year-olds in learning poverty (i.e., unable to read a simple text) rising from 57% in 2019 to 70% in 2022. According to a recent World Bank report, climate change has further compounded the COVID-19 impacts, with 400 million students having faced learning disruptions due to climate change-induced school closures since 2022.

School meals—A catalyst for the SDGs

Enhancing the quality of school meals to deliver co-benefits across multiple SDGs while simultaneously expanding its reach could be a catalyst to turn the tide of the battle. Using a (bio)chemistry analogy, school meal programs can be likened to a catalyst accelerating progress across several SDGs, particularly SDGs 1, 2, and 4. These programs have been shown to improve outcomes around food security, nutrition, health, access to education, learning, and gender equity, while spurring food systems transformation and climate action. However, as with any catalyst, school meal programs can be influenced by catalyst modifiers. Crises, such as those mentioned earlier, act as inhibitors to slow down progress, while promoters, like the School Meals Coalition—help to accelerate it. For instance, during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, 370 million children lost access to school meals. The School Meals Coalition, established in and around the U.N. Food Systems Summit in 2021, has become a key promoter in engendering global, regional, and national political commitment to restore, expand, and improve the quality of programs. This has helped expand the number of children and adolescents benefiting from school meals to 418 million at the end of 2021, compared to 388 million in 2019.

Despite this progress, there are still significant coverage gaps in low-income countries (LICs) and lower-middle-income countries (LMICs), with 165 million children not having access to school meals.

Amid a backdrop of limited economic growth, rising debt, food inflation, losses and damages from climate change-induced natural disasters, among other issues, many LICs and LMICs find themselves treading water, funding efforts to merely sustain and not expand or improve their school meal programs. National programs in many contexts either have slow-moving progress or are retrenching, deteriorating, or both, owing to cuts in government spending due to global shocks.

In spite of the above, policymakers and decisionmakers in many LICs and LMICs are undertaking significant efforts to expand and improve the quality of their school meal programing. However, the current level of financing poses threats to the scalability and sustainability of efforts. This growing demand from countries to scale and improve their school meal programs is evidenced by more than 100 countries signing on to the School Meals Coalition and subscribing to its goal of providing every child with an opportunity to receive a healthy, nutritious meal in school by 2030. Bangladesh, Benin, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Indonesia are just a few countries that have committed to and are working toward universal coverage. Rwanda is close to attaining that objective, reaching near-universal coverage of primary school children. Indonesia, meanwhile, is among the latest countries to step up efforts, with the new Prabowo administration recently launching the country’s new flagship national program that aims to reach more than 82 million learners by 2029.

A key promoter missing from this catalytic reaction is a global financing coordination mechanism, supported by country-led coordination mechanisms, that can turbocharge school meal programs. Such a mechanism can contribute to narrowing the coverage gap in LICs and LMICs by improving coordination and collaboration between donors and partner countries to achieve adequate, predictable, sustainable, cross-sectoral, better-streamlined, and multi-year financing.

A global financing coordination mechanism for school meals

The aid architecture for school meals is unpredictable and under-financed. The funding totals $287 million, or approximately 0.1% of international aid, in 2022, which is far short of the scale of need described further below. Furthermore, it is dominated by a single donor—the United States.

In addition, bilateral donors, international financial institutions, and multilateral development banks are organized and operate in sectoral siloes, resulting in international aid for school meals being fragmented across sectors such as education and human capital, agriculture, social protection, and nutrition.

Recently, there has been a welcome growth in new school meals financing initiatives. This includes the African Development Bank and Children’s Investment Fund Foundation’s $100 million End School-age Hunger Fund, Germany’s EUR 22 million Accelerating School Meals Project and the European Union (EU) Commission’s recent announcement to allocate 65 million euros in budget support to Ukraine’s national school meal program. Together, these three initiatives alone are worth more than two-thirds of the 2022 total international aid to school meals, injecting much-needed additional financing to support the expansion of high-quality school meals.

However, they also underscore the current challenge of the aid system for school meals—that most, if not all, funding is fragmented, and project-based aid is uncoordinated. The EU Commission’s recent budget support to Ukraine serves as a clear example. While European solidarity with Ukraine is fully justified, the very limited international support for school meals in the poorest countries is not. To address this challenge, there is a need to shift donor approaches from isolated, one-off efforts toward a more globally coordinated and strategically aligned approach. As Addison et al. (2015) argue:  “a mass of small projects with different donors and different administrative and accounting procedures is a high-cost route to impact at scale…and tends to have low local ownership with capacity-building often dying out when donors cease funding.”

Similarly, a recent ODI paper further expounds on this in the food security space, stating: “Governments in LICs and LMICs are confronted with what the World Bank has described as an “aid bombardment,” with support for hunger and poverty interventions tied to thousands of transactions and often loosely coordinated projects that are difficult to scale up.” While project aid has its merits, there is an opportunity to draw lessons from other sectors to explore new approaches to align and coordinate school meals aid to countries to reach the scale and sustainability needed to attain the goal of reaching every child with a healthy, nutritious meal in school by 2030.

To reach the scale required to narrow the school meals coverage gap, Room 2 of the 2024 17 Rooms flagship is making the call for LICs and LMICs and the development cooperation community to forge a new cost-sharing partnership in the form of a global financing coordination mechanism. As outlined by Watkins et al. (2024), such a mechanism could “combine the roles of a clearinghouse, a one-stop shop for LICs and LMICs seeking to accelerate progress toward the SDGs, and a strategic coordination mechanism for donors and development finance institutions.”

This is not a proposal in favor of establishing a new, legally independent multilateral entity modeled on the global health funds. The global health funds have showcased strengths in: (i) mobilizing and pooling additional funding around shared objectives; (ii) establishing an inclusive governance structure bringing together key actors across different sectors (government, multilateral, philanthropic, private sector, civil society, academia); (iii) providing countries with longer-term financing commitments, with financing allocated on the basis of a transparent formula; (iii) enhancing alignment between donors and partner countries through country-led coordination mechanisms, with governments drawing on strong technical support; (iv) engineering innovative financing mechanisms; and (v) facilitating the transition toward self-financing programs through co-financing strategies, with GAVI having 19 countries transition as of 2022.

A new form of coordinating school meals financing would seek to reproduce these strengths (taking a light-touch approach) through improved coordination and the pooling of resources geared toward the goal of reaching 150 million more children in LICs and LMICs by 2030 with high-quality school meals. It would also ensure that better-coordinated financing is aligned with national commitments, plans, strategies, and systems. Institutional arrangements to support such an approach could take many forms, taking into account the specific challenges and opportunities associated with school meal programs.

This flexible, light-touch financing mechanism has been referred to in various ways, such as “virtual fund,” “virtual funding,” “virtual pooling,” and “virtual donors’ coordination mechanism.” Regardless of terminology, the core idea remains that development partners, LICs, and LMICs can coordinate funding and pool efforts around shared goals. This provides development partners the flexibility to utilize and scale up existing bilateral or multilateral funding channels without the need to create a centralized “physical” fund. It would also seek to bring together donors currently working independently, enabling enhanced coordination, alignment, and mobilization of financing to achieve greater scale. In various sectors, including social protection and health, donors and partner governments are exploring the adoption of new financing coordination mechanisms at the global or country levels to better align and scale financing and reduce transaction costs in support of government priorities.

An illustrative example of a light-touch global financing coordination mechanism is the Education for All-Fast Track Initiative (EFA FTI)—a precursor of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) that served as a coordinating mechanism for the education sector among bilateral and multilateral funders.

A global financing coordination mechanism for school meals can draw on lessons learned from EFA FTI and global health funds to inject innovation into the school meals aid architecture, providing development partners and governments in LICs and LMICs with a centralized mechanism to coordinate and mobilize additional financing for school meals. This idea looks to adapt an existing solution (global pooled fund—e.g., the global health funds such as GAVI and the Global Fund) that has worked in other sectors but takes a light-touch approach through the establishment of a financing coordination mechanism. Such a financing coordination mechanism would allow for donors and partner governments to engage in a process of goal-setting to establish global, regional, and national ambitions backed by concrete commitments and operational plans to attain them and would provide the platform to mobilize, coordinate, and align external and domestic resources to deliver on ambitions. It would also address several bottlenecks in the international aid architecture for school meals, while providing donors with flexibility to use their existing bilateral or multilateral channels to deliver finance toward school meals.

Though many global funds have limited success, the global health funds, GAVI and the Global Fund, have innovated the global health aid architecture. They have provided an alternative aid modality from the conventional bilateral and multilateral project aid modalities while enhancing donor and partner country coordination. Similarly, a global financing coordination mechanism could offer a solution to address the uncoordinated, fragmented approach to school meal financing hindering expansion ambitions.

1. The global financing coordination mechanism’s ambition and cost estimates

Research by the SFI provides indicative financing parameters for an ambitious scale-up of school feeding programs in LICs and LMICS. Under this “high-ambition” scenario, school meal programs would reach an additional 236 million children and adolescents in pre-primary, primary and secondary schools. The SFI estimates that this would require an average annual investment of $10.8 billion new and additional finance, with $7.2 billion from domestic resources and $ 3.6 billion from foreign aid.  

As shown in the cost estimates, the bulk of additional financing would need to be mobilized by LICs and LMICs, while external financing would play a complementary and catalytic role. A global financing mechanism is needed to mobilize and coordinate new and additional catalytic finance and motivate development partners to employ it strategically to incentivize policymakers and decisionmakers in LICs and LMICs to mobilize new domestic resources for school meals. A global financing mechanism could secure donor commitments to mobilize the average annual foreign aid investment of $ 3.6 billion.

2. Outlining a possible framework for the global financing coordination mechanism

While the intent of this brief is not to fully delve into details of the design of a proposed global financing mechanism, some exploration into its potential characteristics based on best practices from other global funds is useful.

  • Linkages with the School Meals Coalition: The School Meals Coalition could serve as the policy and advocacy platform for the financing coordination mechanism, mobilizing political will and supporting its members in setting global, as well as regional and national school meal targets and priorities. In turn, the financing coordination mechanism could function as the financing and implementation coordination arm of the coalition, enabling countries to deliver on their national commitments and operational plans submitted to the coalition.
  • Flexible pooling resources: Development partners will each have their own interests when engaging in efforts around coordinating financing or pooling resources, including decisions on how their funding would be spent. Some development partners often choose to earmark funds toward a particular region, country, sector, or theme. A financing coordination mechanism offers flexibility for donors as it would not require a physical transfer of funds, allowing them to channel aid to existing donor channels (bilateral and multilateral aid). Such an arrangement could scale up existing bilateral and multilateral school meal projects and programs. While some may argue that there may be more benefit in establishing a global pooled fund, a financing coordination mechanism might be the most viable approach, considering inevitable institutional politics surrounding control over how funds are allocated alongside a lack of donor appetite to create new vertical funds. Moreover, a financing coordination mechanism that brings donors and partner countries to the table has the potential to better coordinate financing, enhance collaboration between donors, development partners and implementers to reduce overlap between efforts, and increase the level of ambition of actors in the school meals ecosystem.
  • Country-led country coordination mechanisms: As with other funds, country-led coordination mechanisms could complement a global financing coordination mechanism. The aim here would not be to generate new platforms but to leverage existing structures to engage in dialogue at the country level between the government, development partners, and civil society actors involved in school meals to harmonize funding and technical assistance, including around the transition toward sustainable financing of programs.
  • Co-financing: Global health funds have employed “conditioned domestic financing” or co-financing policy as a mechanism to incentivize governments to mobilize additional domestic funding for health interventions. GAVI and the Global Fund have demonstrated that catalytic financing can provide LICs and LMICs the incentives to engage in and co-finance the challenging work to scale programs, getting countries over the hump toward self-sustaining programs. A similar mechanism employed by a global financing mechanism could help mobilize the additional domestic funding ($1.8-2.4 billion, depending on the scenario) needed to reach the scales envisaged in the global costing paper.
  • Innovative financing: GAVI, the Global Fund, and the GPE have engineered innovative financing mechanisms such as frontloading mechanisms (e.g., International Financing Facility for Immunisation), debt-swaps, loan buy-downs, consumer donations, results or outcome-based financing, and blended finance mechanisms. Light-touch administrative arrangements for a global financing mechanism could include piggybacking on existing innovative financing mechanisms established by global funds like GPE, including its Debt2Ed and the GPE-Arab Coordination Group (ACG) Smart Education Financing Initiative (SmartEd) in addition to the recently operationalized International Financing Facility for Education.
  • Matching financial support with on-the-ground technical assistance: A global financing mechanism can learn from global health funds in how they channel financing to implementing partners to coordinate the supply of technical assistance to match country efforts to scale and improve programs. Like the global health funds, a global financing mechanism can leverage the existing school meals ecosystem of actors with country-level presence to provide technical assistance and operational support to countries.
  • Tracking school meals financing and performance: A global financing mechanism would enable the tracking of funding flows for school meals from both donors and partners, promote information sharing and catalyze matchmaking between development partners and LMICs and LICs. Learning from the global health funds, this mechanism could integrate performance-based financing principles, encouraging donors and partner governments to link financing to performance, helping to inform future funding decisions. One such consideration is to establish a school meals financing and performance tracking platform similar to the Collaborative Co-financing Platform established by a coalition of ten multilateral development banks. Such a system could virtually track financial flows by crediting donor and partner country financial commitments and recording donor disbursements and partner country expenditures as debits in a global financing coordination mechanism for school meals. In addition to tracking school meals financing, the platform could work with donors and partner governments to define and monitor performance metrics specific to school meals (e.g., coverage targets, nutritional quality of meals, student attendance, etc.). Similar to the Collaborative Co-financing Platform’s Co-financing Portal, it could also have a digital platform where development partners and governments can share information on school meal programs and opportunities to better coordinate financing by identifying opportunities to co-finance school meals-related projects.

3. Moving from idea to action

Based on lessons learned from past efforts in launching global funds, key activities to explore operationalizing a global school meals financing mechanism include:

  • Launching of a global school meals campaign/movement: In the case of EFA FTI, GAVI and the Global Financing Facility for Women, Children and Adolescents (GFF), advocacy campaigns or movements such as Education for All movement, the Universal Childhood Immunization campaign and the Every Women, Every Child campaign were key vehicles to build the broad-based coalition and momentum needed to establish these global pooled funds. A school meals movement/campaign capturing the same dynamism as those campaigns and movements could help put wind in the sails of the global financing mechanism. There has already been progress in building political will and momentum for school meals through the efforts of the School Meals Coalition. In addition, recent efforts by the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty (an initiative incubated in the G20 under the leadership of the Brazilian Presidency to catalyze an SDG 1 and 2 recovery) in launching a school meals “2030 Sprint” (early action priority areas where there could be accelerated action) can also help pole-vault school meals up the global development and political agendas.
  • Identifying and mobilizing a champion country(ies): Champion governments were key in helping catalyze support for establishing global funds. For instance, Norway played a critical role in the establishment of GAVI and the GFF and in mobilizing donor support for the EFA FTI in its early years. Identifying and mobilizing support among the School Meals Coalition’s Task Force could be a good start.

  • Precursor initiative for proof of concept: While efforts are made to build political momentum, a small precursor initiative of mission-aligned development partners and governments from LICs and LMICs could pilot how such a mechanism could look in select countries that have demonstrated a strong commitment and action in scaling up or improving their school meals program. The success of pilot initiatives can reinforce commitments in pilot countries and funders and provide a strong demonstration effect for other governments in LICs and LMICs and prospective development partners. Ongoing efforts by a consortium of partners to co-create a catalytic and technical assistance facility providing targeted support to 15 countries could be the proof of concept for a global financing mechanism that mobilizes and coordinates development assistance for school meals.
  • Identifying and mobilizing influential individuals: There is a need to identify and mobilize individual public and private sector leaders who can provide the entrepreneurial energy to influence processes at various levels, including within governments, U.N. agencies, philanthropies, and global processes.
  • Positioning the idea in forthcoming global fora: Global fora provide good opportunities to socialize and unify governments, development partners, and other stakeholders around the idea. Key events to explore include the 2025 Nutrition for Growth Summit, the fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, the 2025 Summit Against Hunger and Poverty, the 2025 Global Summit of the School Meals Coalition, and the Second World Summit for Social Development in 2025, alongside regional school meals fora.

Authors

  • Acknowledgements and disclosures

    This memo was produced by members of Room 2, a working group linked to Sustainable Development Goal 2 on Zero Hunger, convened as part of the 17 Rooms global flagship in 2024. 17 Rooms is a platform for advancing the economic, social, and environmental priorities embedded in the world’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The initiative is co-hosted by the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution and The Rockefeller Foundation. In 2024, each Room was asked to develop and advance a big idea—a practical action or mechanism that could make a material difference to some aspect of the world’s 17 SDG outcomes by 2030.

    The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. Our mission is to conduct in-depth, nonpartisan research to improve policy and governance at local, national, and global levels. The conclusions and recommendations of any Brookings publication are solely those of its author(s), and do not reflect the views or policies of the Institution, its management, its other scholars, or the funders mentioned above.

  • Footnotes
    1. Watkins, Kevin, Oliver Fiala, Peter Haag and Asma Zubairi. 2024a. School feeding and the Sustainable Development Goals – An agenda to combat child hunger, expand opportunities for education, and reform food systems. ODI Report. London: ODI.
    2. HLPF. 2023. Political Declaration of the high-level political forum on sustainable development convened under the Auspices of the General Assembly. A/RES/78/1.
    3. United Nations. 2023. The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2023: Special Edition. Towards a Rescue Plan for People and Planet. https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2023/The-Sustainable-Development-Goals-Report-2023.pdf
    4. Watkins et al. 2024a (see Footnote 1 for the full citation), p. xii.
    5. United Nations. 2020. The Impact of COVID-19 on Children. New York: United Nations.
    6. Sabarwal, Shwetlena, Sergio Venegas Marin, Marla Spivack and Diego Ambasz. 2024. Choosing Our Future: Education for Climate Action. Washington, DC: World Bank.
    7. Watkins et al. 2024 (see Footnote 1 for the full citation), p. xiv.
    8. Watkins et al. 2024a (see Footnote 1 for the full citation), p. 4.
    9. Ibid.
    10. In the 2022-23 school year, Rwanda reached 93% of primary school children. See Global Child Nutrition Foundation (GCNF). 2024. Global Survey of School Meal Programs Country Report, Rwanda. https://gcnf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Rwanda_2024_Report_R1.pdf.
    11. See https://www.ft.com/content/69209b1a-37b1-437e-83b5-b52d9194d74e
    12. Watkins et al. 2024a (see Footnote 1 for the full citation), p. 67.
    13. The United States accounts for more than two-thirds (69%) of the total official development assistance (ODA) for school meals in 2022. Ibid.
    14. Addison, Tony, Miguel Niño‐Zarazúa, and Finn Tarp. 2015. “Aid, social policy and development.” Journal of International Development 27(8), 1351-1365. https://doi.org/10.1002/jid.3187
    15. Watkins, Kevin, Kathryn Nwajiaku-Dahou and Hetty Kovach. 2024b. Financing the fight against poverty and hunger- mobilising resources for a sustainable development goal reset. ODI Report. London: ODI.
    16. Dodd, Rebecca and Christopher Lane. 2010. “Improving the long-term sustainability of health aid: are Global Health Partnerships leading the way?”. Health Policy and Planning 25 (5):363–371.
    17. Saxenian, H.S. Alkenbrack, M. Freitas Attaran, J. Barcarolo, L. Brenzel, A. Brooks, E. Ekeman, U.K. Griffiths, S. Rozario, N. Vande Maele, and M.K. Ranson. 2024. “Sustainable financing for Immunization Agenda 2030.” Vaccine 42 (1): S73-S81.
    18. A “virtual fund” is a mechanism where financial contributions are not physically transferred into a separate, distinct fund but are instead tracked virtually. This allows donors to continue channelling funding through their existing channels rather than pooling into a physical fund.
    19. For instance, the Government of the United Kingdom is exploring a virtual pooling facility that aims to align financing from several funds. See https://globalallianceagainsthungerandpoverty.org/new/2030-cash-transfers-sprint-press-release/. In Uganda, the Ministry of Health was interested in a virtual pooling structure to better align donor funds with government priorities. See Chee, Grace and Benjamin Picillo. 2019. Strengths, Challenges, and Opportunities for RMNCH Financing in Uganda: Report on RMNCH Financing Assessment. Washington, DC: USAID Maternal and Child Survival Program.
    20. Watkins et al. 2024b (see Footnote 16 for the full citation), p. 93.
    21. Under this scenario’s cost estimates for expanding the reach of school meal programs are based on applying an average benchmark cost for school meal provision of $64 per pupil annually for LICs and LMICs.
    22. For more details on co-financing approach employed by global health funds, see Susan Sparkes, MyMai Yungrattanachai, and Victoria Fan. 2024. Conditioned Domestic ‘Co-financing’ Policies in Global Health: A Landscape Analysis. CGD Policy Paper 341. Washington, DC: Center for Global Development.
    23. GPE’s Debt2Ed looks to incentivize debtors and creditors to agree on debt swap or loan buy-down for education interventions ( See https://www.globalpartnership.org/funding/gpe-multiplier/Debt2Ed); The GPE-ACG SmartEd is a blended finance mechanism that blends GPE grants with loans from members of the Arab Coordination Group (a strategic group of Arab-based bilateral and multilateral development finance institutions). For every U.S. dollar mobilized from GPE, it aims to secure $4 in cofinancing from the ACG https://www.globalpartnership.org/blog/investing-smarter-education-innovative-tools-acg-smarted.
    24. See Keating, Conrad. 2023. Tore Godal and the Evolution of Global Health (1st ed.). Routledge.; and Bermingham, Desmond. 2011. “The politics of global education policy: the formation of the Education for All – Fast Track Initiative (FTI).” Journal of Education Policy 26(4), pp. 557-569.
    25. Members of this Consortium include: The Rockefeller Foundation, the World Food Programme (WFP), the Global Partnership for Education, Novo Nordisk Foundation, WFP’s Center of Excellence Against Hunger in Brazil, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC)—Canada, the Sustainable Financing Initiative and the Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition.

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