How best can the potential of school feeding be maximised to support multi-sectoral integrated frameworks linking agriculture, health, nutrition and education? Can HGSF be a win-win for agriculture, education and health? There is a need to answer these questions operationally and build the evidence base to help policy makers manage the trade-offs across the multiple school feeding objectives.
The interventions involve school feeding implemented by the government of Mali. The national programme was launched in 2009 and currently targets 651 schools located mainly in the 166 most vulnerable communes (official data report that currently 10% of the 9,400 primary schools in the country have a school canteen run by the state or by partners, including WFP and Catholic Relief Services (CRS)). The targets of the school feeding intervention are public primary schools of rural villages and children attending these schools.
This paper develops the design of a field experiment of the HGSF programme in Mali, with baselines planned for 2012.
