The concept of providing resources to subsidize school meals for children from low-income households originated during the late 18th and early 19th Centuries in Europe, initially as private sector, religious, or philanthropic undertakings. Frequently, these efforts sought to address locally identified problems of child poverty and malnutrition observed among the expanding school population.
Interestingly, the first such program was established in 1790 by Benjamin Thompson, an inventor and physicist born in colonial America (in the Massachusetts Bay colony) but who sided with Great Britain during the American Revolution. Thompson was given a commission in the British Army, achieving the rank of Colonel before the war’s end, but left America for Britain in the war’s aftermath and flourished there, earning recognition from King George III with a knighthood. Thompson established a school in Munich, Germany in 1790 called the Poor People’s Institute, which provided food for children while they were in school.
The first school meals program funded by a central government was established in France in 1849, when the government agreed to take over underwriting the effort by redirecting surplus National Guard resources. The French effort also provided books, clothing, and medical attention to school children from low-income households. More than 50 years later, England did the same under the Provision of Meals Act passed by the British Parliament in 1906. Under this law, responsibility for operating the school meal activities was taken over by local school authorities, including the funding needed.
The first school meals program in the United States came about as part of the New Deal package of programs that were enacted in response to the Great Depression under the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A major component of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the first farm bill passed in 1933 consisted of new federal agencies procuring surplus commodities from American farmers to both provide those households with much needed income and also to raise commodity prices by removing some supply from the market. Initially, the Roosevelt administration had planned to simply destroy the surplus food, but soon realized it would be better to distribute it to people who could not afford to buy enough food to feed their children. By 1934, schools in 39 states were participating in programs that prepared and served these federally procured surplus foods to school children, many having received low-interest federal loans to fund the school kitchen and dining facilities.
It wasn’t until 1963 that this concept started to take hold in developing countries, when the brand new World Food Program established such a program in Togo. The United States formally got on the international school feeding bandwagon in 2002 with the establishment of the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition program as part of the 2002 farm bill. This program now uses roughly $250 million in federal funding annually to sponsor school feeding programs in developing countries, currently supporting 57 active projects in 34 countries on the books. The governments of the recipient countries also co-invest in those projects, with roughly a 1:1 match to U.S. funding.
As of 2022, the Global Child Nutrition Foundation (GCNF) estimated that there were about 408 million school-aged children participating in school meals programs around the world. A recent estimate from the World Food Program that came out earlier this year (2025) is a bit higher, at 466 million. According to this report, this estimate is 20 percent higher than it was just four years ago, with the majority (nearly 60 percent) of the growth in the number of students supported by such programs occurring in low-income countries over that period.
Last week, I participated in a panel discussion during a side event on the economic impact of school feeding at the World Food Prize/Borlaug Dialogue in Des Moines, along with Catherine Bertini, a former Executive Director of the World Food Program, and Charlotte Block, a representative of CARE, an NGO that manages U.S. food aid projects in many developing countries. During that session, we talked about the direct economic boost resulting from $67 billion spent annually in procuring food for these programs, as well as the lifetime income gains for individuals whose school participation and thus educational achievements stemmed at least in part from the availability of school meals, especially for female students.
A 2020 article in Frontiers in Public Health examined the economic impacts of school feeding programs in 14 countries, mainly in Africa (9) but also in India and four countries in South America. The study estimated that there were 190 million beneficiaries of these programs in the countries surveyed, spending about $11 billion per year to support the program. The analysis indicated that this program generated the following economic gains across the 14 countries:
• $180 billion in additional human capital created
• $24 billion in improved health and nutrition status
• $156 billion due to improved educational attainment
• $23 billion in gains to local agricultural economies
Overall, the study found that the $11 billion investment in the school feeding programs generated returns of between 7:1 and 35:1.
A big emphasis of school feeding programs in recent decades has been to use it to encourage girls in developing countries to attend school. One feature of the McGovern-Dole approach has been to authorize schools in the program to provide take-home rations to female students, to reinforce the benefit to the household from keeping their daughters in school rather than putting them to work or arranging an early marriage for them.
We know that there are tremendous advantages to girls in their later lives to not only go to school but to stay in school. Research shows that girls with at least a primary school education have lifetime earning potentials that are at least 19 percent greater than their counterparts with no education. The advantages are even greater if they manage to complete secondary or even college educations–a 97 percent edge for the former over counterparts with no schooling, and a whopping 323 percent edge for those with college educations. As the numbers of girls who obtain additional years of schooling increase, their improved productivity not only benefits them as individuals but benefits their communities and societies as well. It is now being recognized that devoting resources to school feeding is a good investment for everyone involved.
