By Tim Cocks
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) -Governments in sub-Saharan Africa have provided school meals to roughly 20 million extra children over the past two years, the World Food Programme (WFP) said on Wednesday, showing a move away from dependence on foreign aid and a stronger commitment to education.
The region saw the biggest rise in school feeding of any region, by nearly a third to 87 million in 2024. Ethiopia, Rwanda and even severely impoverished Madagascar and Chad all managed to feed six times as many over the period.
“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,” the report said.
It was a welcome bright spot on a continent plagued by rising numbers of hungry people as a result of extreme weather linked to climate change, armed conflict and food inflation.
A U.N. report at the end of July found that more than one in five Africans, 307 million, were chronically malnourished, meaning hunger is worse than two decades ago. It predicted the continent would have 60% of the world’s hungry people by 2030.
Poor countries face falling aid from their rich counterparts, with U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration gutting its aid arm and some European nations slashing assistance to reallocate spending to defend themselves against Russia.
The WFP report found that local farmers had also benefited from the school feeding. The government of Benin’s buying local food for these programmes contributed over $23 million to the economy in 2024, it said. More than a third of school meals in Sierra Leone came from food produced by smallholder farmers.
It 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, as donor support continued to fall.
(Reporting by Tim Cocks; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
