Research on School Meals Projects in Africa

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Background The United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service (USDA/FAS) and the United States Agency for International Development Africa Bureau (USAID/AFR) have partnered to bring this opportunity to fruition. It is anticipated that the findings of this collaborative research activity will inform future design and implementation of USDA McGovern Dole and USAID/AFR agriculture, food security, agriculture, resilience, nutrition and education activities. The McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition (McGovern-Dole) program was authorized in 2002 with current appropriations of approximately $200 million annually. The program is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service and is named in honor of Ambassador and former Senator George McGovern and former Senator Robert Dole for their tireless efforts to encourage a global commitment to school feeding and child nutrition. The McGovern–Dole program helps support education, child development, and food security for some of the world’s poorest children. It provides for donations of U.S. agricultural commodities, locally and or regionally procured agricultural commodities, as well as financial and technical assistance, for school feeding and maternal and child nutrition projects in low-income, food-deficit countries that are committed to universal education. The key objectives of the McGovern-Dole program are to reduce hunger and improve literacy and primary education, especially for girls. By providing school meals, teacher training, and related support, McGovern-Dole projects help boost school enrollment and academic performance. At the same time, nutrition programs are offered for pregnant and lactating women, infants, and pre-school children to sustain and improve their health and learning capacity before they enter school. In the 2014 Farm Bill, USDA was authorized to implement a new program, the Local and Regional Food Aid Procurement (LRP) Program. The program was officially launched in 2016 awarding three programs that year and three more programs each subsequent year up to 2019. To date, USDA has funded 12 separate LRP programs in 12 countries with a total funding amount of $35 million. Each year the funding allocations increased for the LRP program and in 2018 the Farm Bill announced that USDA’s McGovern-Dole program would allow local and regional purchase under the McGovern-Dole program, no longer as a separate program anymore. This allowed for all projects that applied in FY2020 to have a local and regional component to the program to encourage local, regional and national ownership of school feeding, and build the capacity of small holder farmers using schools as a guaranteed market outlet. The research questions below are derived from the McGovern-Dole School Meals Learning Agenda. Developed in 2016, the Learning Agenda is intended to identify gaps in the knowledge base within the school meals literature that USDA believes should be addressed as a matter of priority.

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