School Meals Program

Around the world, more than 400 million school-aged children suffer from hunger. The majority of these children - most of them girls - do not attend school.

WFP school meals programs involve just what the name implies - providing meals in schools.  The idea is simple; the impact is significant.  Serving food at school not only fights hunger among the world’s poorest children, it also helps get them into school, providing them with an important key to a better future - an education.

School meals come in the form of porridge, which is served in a cup. For most schoolchildren this cup of food is the only meal they get all day. WFP encourages people to “fill the cup” by making a donation or volunteering to help raise awareness. It costs as little as 25 cents to provide a healthy meal to a child in school, and $50 will feed a child for the entire school year.

WFP now provides meals to an average 20 million children in school; almost half of whom are girls. School meals programs are implemented in some 70 countries; over half of them in Africa where 11 million schoolchildren receive meals.