The Gambia, Home-Grown School Meals Programme: Impact Evaluation

Key takeaways

1. School meals directly translated into improved food security and dietary diversity, with greater impacts observed among girls.

2. Mental well-being improved substantially (decreased rates of stress and depression), especially among girls, because of school meals.

3. Implementing an accountability system based on teacher incentives was an effective way to increase teacher attendance, with a main effect observed among female teachers.

4. School meals and teacher incentives both increased child attendance and reduced dropout rates during the school year among children whose attendance was low to begin with.

5. Despite higher attendance, there were limited improvements in children’s literacy test scores during the evaluation period. However, combining school meals and teacher incentives led to improved performance on basic reading tasks.

6. School meals, with or without teacher incentives, were as cost-effective as cash transfers or school inputs (e.g. providing textbooks, uniforms, etc.) for improving learning-adjusted years of schooling