Background and reasons for evaluation
1. This inception note was prepared by the United Nations World Food Programme Office of Evaluation (OEV)’s Impact Evaluation Unit and the World Bank’s Development Impact (DIME) department based on an initial pilot phase in the academic year 2022-2023 and a revised feasibility assessment undertaken during an in-country mission in June 2023. The purpose of the inception note is to summarize key information about the impact evaluation to inform stakeholders, guide the evaluation team, and specify expectations during the various evaluation phases.
1.1. INTRODUCTION
2. This inception note is for the impact evaluation of the School Feeding Commodity Voucher model expansion in seven provinces in Burundi. This evaluation will be conducted in partnership with the WFP Office of Evaluation (OEV), the WFP Burundi country office (CO), and the World Bank’s Development Impact (DIME) department. 3. The evaluation will take place from June 2023 to June 2026, covering programme activities from January 2024 to January 2026.
1.2. CONTEXT
4. Currently, the Burundi WFP CO school feeding model is based on a centralized procurement model, where WFP procures food and delivers them to schools, and meals are then prepared by parents of the students on a rotational basis. The meals comprise a combination of imported and local food such as cereals, beans and peas and parents contribute to food preparation on a rotational basis.1
5. Starting in 2022, the Burundi CO has been piloting a new decentralized school feeding procurement modality based on Commodity Vouchers (CV) to schools. Under this new Commodity Voucher (CV) procurement model WFP will make a transfer to the Direction Provinciale de l'Education (DPE) in each participating province, which will issue a restricted tender process to purchase from local cooperatives. Awarded cooperatives will then deliver food directly to schools. Meals will continue to be prepared by children’s parents on a rotational base. This new model has the potential for developing agricultural markets in predominantly agricultural communities and may have a positive impact on local cooperatives and farmers.
6. Leveraging on the pilot of this new procurement model in the school year 2022/2023, a pilot impact evaluation was conducted to examine the impact of the CV procurement model on school meals’ quantity, quality, and diversity. The pilot impact evaluation compared data from 50 schools randomly enrolled in the new procurement model with 45 randomly selected schools still receiving food according to the centralized procurement model. Preliminary findings which covered the period from September 2021 until February 2023 indicate that the new CV model resulted in a 60% higher number of meal days compared to the previous centralized model, with a large increase in rice distribution. This suggests that this model might also have the potential for increasing children’s learning and nutritional outcomes.
7. Based on the evidence and lessons learned during the pilot phase2 (June 2022 – July 2023), this inception note presents the design for a large-scale impact evaluation that aim to assess the impact of the decentralized procurement system on the local economy (i.e., smallholder farmers and cooperatives, market prices) as well as on children’s nutrition, health, and education outcomes.