The Role of CSOs in Ensuring Nutritious School Meals for All: Online Workshop by FAO, WFP, World Vision & GCNF

More than 400 million children rely on school meals every day, making school meal programmes the world’s most extensive safety net. In many vulnerable contexts, these meals constitute a significant portion of children’s daily diets. Ensuring that school meals respond to children’s nutrition priorities and provide the most optimal composition according to the possibilities of the school food system is thus imperative for supporting healthier diets in these population groups.

A key strategy for achieving this is the development and implementation of nutrition guidelines and standards (NGS) for school meals that are tailored to children’s specific dietary needs, grounded in strong evidence, and respectful of local sociocultural practices. When embedded in national policy and legal frameworks grounded in the right to food, NGS become powerful tools for protecting children’s right to food. 

Civil society organizations (CSOs) play a vital role in this process—advocating for, co-creating, and monitoring school meal nutrition standards to ensure programmes are are context-specific, inclusive, and aligned with children's real-world needs.

FAO and WFP, together with the CSO Group of the School Meals Coalition, represented by World Vision and GCNF, are organizing an online workshop for technical staff from international and national CSOs to:

• Gain familiarity with the process of developing context-specific and robust nutrition criteria to guide school meal planning
• Understand how right to food principles are applied in the development and implementation of school meal nutrition guidelines and standards
• Identify the key roles of CSOs in advocating for and monitoring compliance with these guidelines and standards
• Co-create actionable recommendations for CSOs at local, national, and global levels

The workshop will be held via Zoom, lasting about 3 hours. Pre- and post-workshop evaluations will help tailor content to participants’ needs and measure learning progress.

Upcoming Workshop Details: 

📅 Date: 6 October 2025

🕙 Time: 14:00  (CEST)

📍 Platform: Zoom 

🔗 Register here: https://fao.zoom.us/meeting/register/i5QnCHmwS7KCb7UKuP8KRA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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