Designed to reduce hunger and improve nutrition, the school feeding scheme initiative is a globally recognised social protection tool that helps not only to keep children in the system, it has also reduced financial pressure on parents and taught children the importance of growing their own fresh produce.
Providing meals in schools was one of the world’s first public welfare programmes. Co-director of food safety and security at the University of Pretoria, Professor Lise Korsten, says school feeding schemes began in the 1900s in Britain as school dinners, necessitated by high levels of poverty and child hunger that resulted in many deaths.