The World Food Programme (WFP) reported on Wednesday that governments in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) provided school meals to roughly 20 million extra children over the past two years, demonstrating a move by the government to depend less on foreign aid and a stronger commitment to education.
According to the figures from the WFP, the region recorded the biggest rise in school feeding in the global geopolitcal region, by nearly a third to 87 million in 2024, with Ethiopia, Rwanda, Madagascar and Chad increasing the feeding of their children by six times during the period.
The WFP reported: “Government investments in school meals … (signal) a significant shift from reliance on foreign aid to recognising school meals as a strategic public investment in children’s education (and) health.”
Observers believe that the growing commitment of the SSA’s government to children feeding is a welcome development in a continent plagued by rising numbers of hungry and malnourished people due to the huge toll extreme weather linked to climate change, armed conflict and food inflation.
The WFP report showed that local farmers had also benefited from the school feeding programme with the government of Benin’s buying more local food for the programmes, thus contributing over $23 million to the nation’s GDP in 2024.
In addition, the report indicated that more than a third of school meals in Sierra Leone came from food produced by smallholder farmers.
Despite the improvements in the SSA’s school feeding programmes, the WFP warned, however, that millions of children, especially in some of the lowest income African countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Somalia, and South Sudan, still lacked access to school meals, amid declining support from donor agencies.
It would be recalled that a U.N. report late July found that more than one in five Africans, representing about 307 million, were chronically malnourished, implying that hunger level in the continent is worse than the rate recorded about 20 years ago,
The U.N predicted that the continent would have 60% of the world’s hungry people by 2030 as poor nations continue to experience dwindling aid from their rich counterparts.