School meal programs are one of the largest global safety nets. Nearly 80 million children globally received school meals through government-led efforts in 2025, a 20% jump from 2020. Developing countries, in particular, have seen an uptick.
Programs that feed children at school have been shown to improve attendance, attention and learning. They can also boost local economies by sourcing from local farmers and suppliers. But rising food prices and declining aid threaten those gains.
With a new accelerator, a consortium of foundations and government agencies aims to help governments from the US to Africa stretch their school feeding budgets further and reach more students. The goal is to reach an additional 100 million children by 2030.
The Rockefeller Foundation, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany, Novo Nordisk Foundation, and the World Food Programme teamed to launch the School Meals Accelerator. The accelerator builds on a coalition that grew out of the UN Food Systems Summit held in 2021. Some 120 countries have committed to delivering school meal programs.
Rockefeller’s $25 million investment in the accelerator follows the foundation’s $100 million commitment last year to combat rising global nutrition insecurity via school meal programs.
“Academic achievement goes up, especially for girls, but then we can use school meals as a way to create economic development if you source locally,” the foundation’s Roy Steiner told ImpactAlpha.
Long-term, school feeding programs can serve not just as social safety nets, but as tools to shift the way we source food and empower farming communities. Rockefeller wants to borrow from countries that have successfully implemented school feeding programs with local sourcing and adapt them to other countries.
In Brazil for instance, which Steiner terms as “probably the most effective school meal program in the world,” more than $824 million was allocated by the government in 2022 for the national school feeding program. It sustained over 35 million primary and secondary school children. The government mandated that 30% of this financing be used to source and pay up front for food from small-scale farmers from family-owned and rural farms, agrarian reform settlements, Indigenous communities and quilombola communities who are descendants of former enslaved people.
Rockefeller recently signed an agreement with CAF, the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, to develop country-specific pilots of the school feeding program.
Healthy food
Nutritious and sustainably grown food is a growing focus for philanthropic funders. A longtime supporter of nutritious food programs, Rockefeller has championed “food as medicine” programs in the US that seek to address health challenges with targeted nutrition in hospitals and government programs. A pilot project with the US Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, supports nutritional interventions to veterans.
Last month, it teamed up with family office Builders Vision to launch the $10 million Food is Medicine Impact Fund. Treating food as medicine is one of the clearest opportunities to improve health outcomes by strengthening the connection between food, nutrition and care,” said Haven Leeming of Builders Vision Philanthropy.
Alongside the launch of the school meals accelerator, Rockefeller, Media RED and Food Tank premiered FOOD 2050, a documentary that explores the state of food systems and the challenge of feeding 10 billion people by 2050 using regenerative means. The film, which follows activists, scientists, agriculturalists, and entrepreneurs and showcases innovations in climate, soil health and nutrition, underscores the need for long-term thinking and collaboration.
“We’re facing a lot of such existential threats,” says Steiner. “The combination of climate change and asset polarization is the greatest threat and that damages our ability to collaborate and our ability to solve local problems.”
Community-driven
School meals programs are one avenue for change. Most governments already recognise the need to feed their school-going children. There has been a 20% jump in government-led school feeding efforts over the last five years; what’s needed, says Steiner, is specialized expertise to fix leaks in logistics, weak procurement systems and corruption that hinder effective programs.
The new accelerator “is not an imposed, top down, donor-driven thing, especially in a world where donor funds are reducing,” he said. “This is a new model of development, it’s locally-owned, nationally-owned and paid for by the government.”
The new facility will work directly with government entities responsible for these meal programs, often ministries of education, to develop sustainability plans and strengthen long-term implementation capacity. While its focus will be on low to middle-income countries, the accelerator will be open to countries globally with demonstrable commitment to their feeding programs through both capital allocation and political support.
Adaptation to other countries will not be uniform and will require understanding local contexts. In some countries, program financing will be purely government-led. Others will require hybrid financing where donors are brought in, or parents are asked to shoulder some of the costs involved.
The end goal is to have more children enrolled in schools, accessing nourishing foods that are locally and sustainably sourced from regenerative means.
Rockefeller is developing a meal quality measurement tool with the World Food Program and other collaborators, that will track dietary quality and make sure meals are improving over time, while providing consistent feedback to governments.
“We can talk all we want about climate resilient crops, but farmers won’t grow them if there isn’t a demand,” he said. “We can use school meals as a way to drive food system change, drive healthier dietary patterns and help governments shift their food systems without spending more money to introduce something that’s more resilient, less wasteful, and is more nutritious.”
