European Child Guarantee Coordinators meet to discuss provision of school meals to children in need

Co-organised with the School Meals Coalition, it aimed to take stock of the latest academic findings, the progress achieved since the adoption of the Child Guarantee Recommendation on these aspects, and pave the way forward. 

While incidence of child malnutrition and obesity is on the rise in Europe, according to Dr. Kremlin WICKRAMASINGHE (World Health Organisation’s Regional Adviser for Europe on nutrition), Prof. Donald BUNDY, Director of the Research Consortium of the School Meals Coalition, underlined how quality school meal programmes can address these trends. He also stressed that by putting a stop to their roll-out, the COVID-19 lockdowns demonstrated their critical role as a social safety net for vulnerable families, and that they yield a range of other types of positive return, spanning across education, health and agriculture. 

Based on his longitudinal counterfactual analysis of the universal school meal programme in Sweden, Prof. Dan-Olof ROOTH then explained that participation in this scheme leads to higher educational outcomes of children, resulting in 3% higher lifetime income on average, and with a gain as high as 6% for the children from the bottom quintile. He stressed that the benefit/cost ratio of the Swedish scheme is thus 4/1 and even 7/1 for disadvantaged children, solely taking into account its positive impact on income. 

Child Guarantee Coordinators noted that significant progress on school meals provision has been achieved since 2021 and the adoption of the Child Guarantee. Croatia and Luxembourg introduced universal free school meal schemes, Ireland extended its programme and Denmark launched pilot projects. 

Discussions allowed to identify common obstacles and some practical ways to overcome them, building among others on takeaways from EU-funded projects such as Schoolfood4change. This helped further pave the way toward ensuring that all children in need have access to at least one healthy meal each school day for free and to healthy nutrition more broadly. Documents from the meeting can be found here. 

The School Meals Coalition is a Government-led and partner-supported network on 106 countries and 137 partners working with the goal that every child has the opportunity to receive a healthy, nutritious meal in school by 2030.