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THE STATE OF SCHOOL FEEDING IN TIMES OF UNPRECEDENTED NEEDS
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic severely hit education systems around the world. School closures left millions of children without access to regular school meals. In Western Africa alone, approximately 34 million school children were affected.¹ Even before the pandemic emptied plates, 73 million most vulnerable children in 60 low-income countries are currently not reached by school meals. Most of these children – 84 percent - live on the African continent. The global food crisis driven by conflict, climate shocks, and the threat of global recession now adds to the challenges faced by children and their families and threatens to create devastating reversals in the health and wellbeing of children and future generations. Nearly half of the 345 million people (up from 135 million in 2020) that are facing acute hunger are younger than 18 years old – 75 million are school children. For Western Africa, the consequences of the global food crisis are particularly devastating as the region with its young and growing population is characterized by very low coverage of school feeding. National governments are currently reaching only 16 percent of all 136 million school-aged children in the region; 56 million of them are out of school.
With education as the bedrock of human capital, the global food crisis could be a further step back in the efforts to reach universal school meal coverage by 2030, resulting in irreversible losses in human capital and adversely affecting the growth potential of fragile, lowincome countries.