Impact of feeding children in school: evidence from Bangladesh

Published on March 9, 2022

In July 2002, in order to diminish hunger in the classroom as well as to promote school enrollment and retention rates, the Government of Bangladesh and the U.N. World Food Programme launched the School Feeding Program (SFP) in chronically food-insecure areas of Bangladesh. SFP is the first effort in Bangladesh to provide incentives directly to primary-school children themselves, as opposed to cash or food to parents for sending their children to school. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the impact of the SFP in Bangladesh. The evaluation is based on a number of surveys at the household, school and community levels in addition to achievement tests for the schoolchildren, carried out in late 2003. Some of the major findings are highlighted here.

The SFP provides a mid-morning snack consisting of eight fortified wheat biscuits to some one million children in approximately 6,000 primary schools in highly food-insecure rural areas, plus four slum areas in Dhaka City. At a cost of U.S. 6 cents per packet of eight, the biscuits provide 300 kilocalories and 75 percent of the recommended daily allowance of vitamins and minerals. SFP has raised school enrollment by 14.2 percent, reduced the probability of dropping out of school by 7.5 percent, and increased school attendance by about 1.3 days a month. These results are obtained from econometric models that captured the impact of the SFP alone, isolating the effects of income and other factors. An extremely high percentage of mothers report several positive effects of the SFP on their children. They note that children’s interests in attending school and concentration on studies have increased; they are livelier and happier than before, and their incidence of illness has declined. Also, SFP improves child nutritional status and their academic performance. The encouraging findings of this study suggest that the SFP could well be scaled-up to benefit many more children—but care must be taken with targeting. To achieve maximum benefit for the cost, the program should cover those areas where undernutrion is a serious problem, school enrollment and attendance rates are low, and dropout rates are high.