Food For Education: A Path Forward After 10 Years of Learnings

McGovern Dole Food-for-Education (FFE) projects, funded by the United States Department of Agriculture, aim to reduce hunger and improve literacy outcomes for school-age children, especially for girls, around the world. The projects provide a combination of school meals and a host of literacy components ranging from teacher training to school libraries.

Since 2013, AIR has been contracted as an external evaluator for FFE projects across seven countries. Ten years later we have gained deep empirical insights; cross-country comparative, global information; and local knowledge about the program, how it differs across contexts, its implementation, and its impact.

On February 7, 2023, AIR hosted a webinar presenting new findings from meta-analyses of various FFE projects.

Participants heard from a panel of experts presenting lessons learned related to:

COVID-19 disruptions and school closures;
Literacy interventions and their impact on student learning; and
Scalability and sustainability of these projects.

AIR literacy experts outlined how these lessons learned–along with the generation of new evidence–are being applied to significantly improve the effectiveness of literacy outcomes as part of FFE programming in Benin and beyond.