Nutrition is integral to children’s physical and cognitive development and overall well-being, and consequently, their learning capacities and academic performance. Various studies have documented the direct relationship between nutrition and education.
A 2006 World Bank study, Repositioning Nutrition as Central to Development: A Strategy for Large-Scale Action, found that malnourished children learn less per year of schooling and are more likely to drop out of school. Similarly, a 2009 UNICEF Report, Tracking Progress on Child and Maternal Nutrition, found decreased cognitive performance in primary and secondary education due to malnutrition. These studies clearly emphasise the critical role of nutrition in children’s academic performance and the importance of School Feeding Programmes (SFPs) or School Nutrition Programmes (SNPs).
School-based nutrition interventions help address malnutrition in school-aged children by ensuring their continued access to nutritious meals. The assurance of school meals every day is a blessing for millions of children worldwide. A well-nourished child is healthier and more attentive, thus more capable of achieving academic success and acquiring lifelong learning capacities, which will serve as the foundation for a healthy and productive adulthood.
Across the world, countries have been working to mitigate the challenge of child malnutrition and classroom hunger by designing and implementing home-grown school feeding programmes. Though beneficial, these programmes come with their own challenges, mainly around funding issues, logistics and infrastructure limitations and monitoring and evaluation complexities.
While governments generally seek to address these issues domestically through policy formulation, technology and collective efforts, there is one avenue that is yet to be fully explored - international collaboration. When malnutrition is a problem of global significance, partnerships at the international level help make a difference by ensuring their continuity, adding to the efficiency and amplifying the impact.
Strategic collaborations at the global level will facilitate the pooling of financial and technical resources, reducing the burden on individual governments and ensuring the sustainability of school meal programmes. These collaborations also encourage improvement and innovation by leveraging technology through collective efforts to enhance the programme.
An apt example of this will be an improvement in production and distribution systems or monitoring and evaluation using mobile apps. By sharing operational best practices, research data and innovation breakthroughs, countries can optimise national school meal programmes. Replicable and scalable models can be shared with other countries, thus ensuring that children across the world benefit from them. Fostering global cooperation can address classroom hunger and child malnutrition and help ensure that no child is left behind in their pursuit of education.
Organisations such as the World Food Programme (WFP) and UNICEF are already helping governments and NGOs by providing technical support, funding and strategic guidance. By assisting governments in building capacities to implement the school feeding programme, these organisations ensure quality and efficient implementation of the programme, actively contributing to the food and nutrition security of children.
Global partnerships enable opportunities for effectively addressing the issue of classroom hunger and malnutrition to ensure equitable access to nutrition and education. Helping scale and sustain school feeding programmes through collaborations beyond borders will make them more impactful. To this end, a model that can be drawn upon is the PM POSHAN Abhiyaan in India.
Collaborative efforts such as these will reinforce global solidarity as nations and organisations work together to combat classroom hunger and malnutrition in line with global and national development goals. In promoting a healthier and more educated future generation, international partnerships will greatly contribute to two critical UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) -- SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and SDG 4 (Quality Education).
Successfully leveraging the power of global partnerships will help address socioeconomic issues, with an emphasis on the sharing of knowledge, resources and expertise by designing and implementing impactful solutions. This is particularly true in the context of child nutrition and, subsequently, child health and education. After all, the progress of a society corresponds with the quality of life that it has to offer to its children -- the flagbearers of tomorrow.
(The author is Chief Executive Officer at The AkshayaPatra Foundation)