Governments around the world are invited to contribute with vital data to the Global Survey of School Meals Programmes 2024. By completing the questionnaire, countries have the opportunity to provide essential information on school meals for the 2022 school year. The questionnaire is available in eight languages – Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish – and is open for answers until May 2024. The final report is scheduled to be released in November 2024.
The survey is carried out by the Global Child Nutrition Forum (GCNF) and represents the most extensive data collection effort on national and large-scale school meals programmes around the world. The resulting data not only enriches knowledge about these programmes, but also provides governments and other stakeholders with a global base of standardised information, essential for making informed decisions.
Since its launch, the Global Survey has been carried out twice, covering the 2017 and 2020 school years. On these occasions, it was possible to collect information from 155 countries, marking a significant advance in the standardisation and regularity of school feeding data collection directly from governments around the world.
GCNF and the WFP Centre of Excellence
The Forum is an annual conference that supports countries in developing and implementing sustainable school feeding programmes. The GCNF helps governments around the world to create national home-grown school feeding programmes, develop markets for small farmers, create opportunities for women entrepreneurs and ultimately be independent of international aid.
The World Food Programme (WFP) Centre of Excellence against Hunger Brazil also shares the mission of facilitating the exchange of knowledge on school feeding between countries, mainly by bringing good practices carried out in this sector in Brazil to other countries in the global South. The Centre has participated in editions of the Forum in recent years and has contributed to strengthening partnerships, exchanging experiences and acquiring knowledge about school feeding.
For Vinicius Limongi, Programme Officer at the WFP Centre of Excellence in Brazil, “the Forum is a great opportunity to exchange knowledge and participation in the questionnaire is essential for us to have access to data that can help various countries improve their school feeding programmes and fight hunger, especially among children and teenagers”.
In 2024, the Global Child Nutrition Forum will be held from 9 to 12 December in Osaka, Japan, with four days of peer exchange and technical workshops bringing together leaders of school feeding programmes from around the world.