Información resumida sobre una ley que garantiza el derecho a la alimentación adecuada y la nutrición de niños, niñas y adolescentes en el Sistema Nacional de Educación

The situational status of Sustainable Schools in Latin America and the Caribbean - 2021, prepared within the framework of the Consolidation of School Feeding Programs in Latin America and the Caribbean project, brings together a summary of the experiences of the implementation of the Sustainable Schools methodology in the countries of the region, highlighting aspects such as challenges, scaling, implications, expansion of school feeding programs, lessons learned, and recommendations, with a view to disseminating good practices. The Sustainable Schools methodology, created in 2012 within the framework of the Brazil-FAO International Cooperation Program, has already been implemented in 15 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, reaching more than 23,000 schools.

This publication seeks to support practitioners by providing methodological guidelines for conducting rigorous impact assessments of Home Grown School Feeding (HGSF) programmes. It presents an overview of the main technical issues to be addressed depending on the characteristics of the context and of the intervention itself. While these guidelines are mainly designed for monitoring and evaluation officers working for United Nations agencies, local governments or non-governmental organizations, its contents can be of interest to a wider audience of policymakers, researchers and practitioners interested in multi-sectoral, complex programmes linking agriculture and nutrition.

The School food and nutrition - Global action plan seeks to consolidate and guide FAO’s synergistic efforts, setting out priority and concrete outputs to be achieved by 2026. Key activities are presented in the plan and organized according to the following action areas: 1. promote the uptake of and investment in holistic approaches to school food and nutrition (SFN); 2. enhance capacities to design, implement and monitor effective SFN interventions; 3. strengthen policy and legal frameworks that enable SFN implementation; and 4. mobilize resources for ensuring regular and better support to countries. These have been prioritized based on identified gaps and needs, and considering the Organization’s technical competence and organizational comparative advantage. Such activities are meant to be adapted, contextualized and implemented according to regional and national priorities.

Nutrition guidelines and standards for school food programmes can improve the quality, quantity and adequacy of foods and meals available in schools. However, setting these can be an intensive process and not all countries have the information, time or resources to do it.

The project “Nutrition guidelines and standards for safeguarding schoolchildren and adolescents’ right to food” aims to develop a global methodology to design nutrition guidelines and standards for school food, which will initially be piloted in Cambodia and Ghana at subnational level. Additional tools and measures will also be developed to complement the nutrition guidelines and standards, thus enhancing their impact, ensuring their effectiveness and facilitating their integration in national policy and legal frameworks.