School Meals Could Add Years of Schooling and Boost Lifetime Earnings by a Quarter, Study Finds

A simple plate of food served at school may be one of the most powerful economic tools available to governments in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a sweeping new analysis published in Nature Health. Researchers led by Tom Forzy and Stéphane Verguet of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, working with partners across government ministries, the World Food Programme and academic institutions in five countries, have produced the most detailed multi-country estimate to date of how school feeding programmes shape educational attainment and, by extension, the lifetime earnings of the children they reach.

The study examined Burundi, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique and Namibia, five countries that differ enormously in wealth, food security and education system maturity, yet all of which operate national or large-scale school feeding programmes. The researchers combined nationally representative household surveys with administrative education data, comparing children who received school meals with children who did not, both at the national level and across subnational regions, and separately for boys and girls. Their central finding is striking: beneficiaries of school feeding would gain, on average, 1.3 additional years of schooling compared with non-beneficiaries, with country-level estimates ranging from a low of 0.6 years to a high of 2.3 years.

The logic behind these gains is grounded in decades of nutrition and education research. Chronic food insecurity pushes families toward painful trade-offs, and one of the most common responses is to withdraw children from school, either because the family cannot afford the indirect costs of attendance or because a hungry child cannot concentrate, walk long distances to class or sustain the physical demands of the school day. School meals act as a form of social protection, transferring resources directly to households while strengthening the incentive to keep children enrolled. When a nutritious meal arrives reliably at school, the marginal cost of sending a child falls, and the marginal benefit rises, making dropout less likely and grade progression more likely.

Translating additional schooling into money is where the study becomes an economic argument as much as an educational one. The researchers estimated the returns to education using adapted Mincer equations, the workhorse framework of labour economics that relates log earnings to years of schooling and experience, supplemented where appropriate by published estimates from the global literature. Across the five countries, each additional year of education was associated, on average, with 13.3 per cent higher earnings, with estimates ranging from 9.5 per cent to 19.5 per cent. Combining the schooling gains with these returns, the team projected that school feeding beneficiaries would see lifetime earnings approximately 25.6 per cent higher than comparable children who did not receive meals, an enormous cumulative effect originating from what is often regarded as a modest, routine intervention.

The disaggregated analysis reveals where those benefits concentrate. Because the researchers modelled impacts both nationally and subnationally, they could identify the regions within each country where school feeding is likely to deliver the largest educational payoffs. Unsurprisingly, the greatest gains appear in disadvantaged areas, where baseline dropout rates are high, food insecurity is severe and alternative social protection is thin. In such settings, the meal programme effectively compensates for broader gaps in the social safety net. The analysis by sex also allows the programme’s role in closing gender gaps in schooling to be examined, an important consideration given that girls in low-income settings are often the first to be withdrawn from school when household resources tighten, and given the well-documented downstream benefits of girls’ education for fertility, child mortality and intergenerational health.

The methodological machinery behind these estimates is worth unpacking, because the authors are candid about its limits. In Ethiopia and Malawi, where rich household survey data were available, including the Ethiopian Socioeconomic Survey and multiple rounds of the Malawi Integrated Household Survey, the team estimated transitions between schooling states directly from observed data. For Burundi, Mozambique and Namibia, they constructed a documented transition-matrix framework, using education management information system data and national statistics to model how beneficiary and non-beneficiary cohorts progress through the school system. The schooling gains were then propagated through Mincerian or literature-based returns to produce projected earnings differentials. The analytic code, along with processing and estimation pipelines for the countries with public data, has been released openly on GitHub, an unusually transparent step that allows other researchers to reproduce, stress-test and extend the modelling.

That transparency matters because the authors themselves label their headline numbers as observational plausible upper bounds rather than causal guarantees. Beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries are not randomly assigned; school feeding programmes are typically targeted, deliberately or otherwise, toward needier regions, which complicates naive comparisons. The team ran extensive sensitivity analyses, visualised in their published heat maps, to explore how alternative assumptions about returns to education, transition probabilities and programme coverage affect the results, and the qualitative conclusion, that school feeding meaningfully increases retention and lifetime earnings, is robust across specifications. Even so, they explicitly call for new longitudinal quasi-experimental studies, ideally exploiting staggered programme rollouts or sharp eligibility thresholds, to pin down causal estimates with the precision that policy commitments of this scale deserve.

Even interpreted as upper bounds, the findings arrive at a consequential moment. School feeding has expanded dramatically worldwide, reaching hundreds of millions of children, and is increasingly championed not merely as a nutrition intervention but as a cross-sectoral investment spanning health, education and social protection. Previous systematic reviews and meta-analyses have found positive but heterogeneous effects of school meals on enrolment, attendance and learning, and value-for-money studies have been completed or are underway in each of the five study countries under the Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition, funded through an original grant from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation with follow-on support from the World Food Programme and other partners. The new Nature Health analysis adds a lifetime-earnings dimension to that evidence base, converting years of schooling into the currency that finance ministries ultimately weigh.

The economic framing also reframes the cost debate. School feeding programmes require sustained procurement of food, logistics and administration, and critics have long questioned whether the resources might deliver more if spent on textbooks, teacher training or direct cash transfers. But the earnings projections here suggest that the benefits of keeping children in school compound over entire working lives, and that they accrue disproportionately to the poorest regions, where the marginal social value of a retained pupil is highest. There are broader dividends as well, beyond the individual wage premium: parental education is strongly linked to child survival, and education shifts fertility patterns and population health in ways that markets do not fully capture. A meal that keeps a girl in school for two extra years may influence the health and schooling of the next generation.

For the five countries studied, and for the many others watching, the message is that school meals should be evaluated with the same seriousness as any major public investment, using data on who benefits, where the gains are largest and what the long-run returns look like. The Harvard-led team’s open data and code make that kind of evaluation more feasible than ever. What remains is the harder scientific task they themselves identify: following real cohorts of children over time, with designs that isolate the causal effect of the meal from the poverty that motivates it. Until then, the numbers stand as a provocative estimate that one of the oldest interventions in the development toolkit, feeding hungry children at school, may quietly be one of the highest-return investments a government can make.

Subject of Research: Estimated effects of school feeding programmes on educational attainment and lifetime economic returns in Burundi, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique and Namibia

Article Title: Impact of school feeding programmes on educational attainment and economic returns in five African countries

Article References: Forzy, T., Ramponi, F., Iversen, I., Durizzo, K., Kim, S., Gautam, P., Avallone, S., Memirie, S. T., Habtemichael, M., Getnet, F., Wogasso, Y., Peterson, H., Masamba, K., Saka, A., Nkengurutse, J., Ndayitwayeko, W.-M., Ntunzwenimana, M., Bigirimana, L., Mbengue, M., … Verguet, S. (2026). Impact of school feeding programmes on educational attainment and economic returns in five African countries. Nature Health. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44360-026-00176-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44360-026-00176-0

Keywords: school feeding, educational attainment, lifetime earnings, sub-Saharan Africa, returns to education, dropout, social protection, Mincer equation, food security, Nature Health, Harvard Chan School, education economics