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Review
. 2025 Jan 9:12:1415172.
doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1415172. eCollection 2024.

Integrated health and nutrition approaches to school feeding: maximising future human capital in Latin America and the Caribbean

Laura M Irizarry  1 , Marie Evane Tamagnan  2 , Carla Mejía  1 , Heidi Kessler  3 , Sarah Grundahl Kohnstamm  1 , Giulia Baldi  1
Affiliations
Review

Integrated health and nutrition approaches to school feeding: maximising future human capital in Latin America and the Caribbean

Laura M Irizarry et al. Front Public Health. .

Abstract

Integrated health and nutrition packages in schools have been shown to be a cost-effective approach to support children's well-being and academic achievement; yet few countries adequately invest in promoting such integration. School feeding programmes in Latin America are among the best-established, with some of the largest scale and coverage in the world. National School Meal programmes in Latin America and the Caribbean benefit over 80.3 million children and adolescents in the region. This paper seeks to determine the level of integration of complementary activities to school meal programmes in the region by examining their determinant factors: objectives, complementary services, governing regulatory frameworks, and monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. Our review reveals that although most governments offer school meals together with at least one complementary health and/or nutrition intervention, multisectoral commitment and investment is lacking. Under the premise that most school meal programmes in Latin America and the Caribbean have the potential to maximize their impact by providing integrated packages that meet children's health and nutrition needs, we provide recommendations and raise considerations for the revision of programmatic guidance and policies moving forward. This analysis is relevant to countries internationally and calls for a comparable analysis to be carried out to promote a wide-reaching exchange on the integration of complementary activities to school feeding programmes globally.

Keywords: Latin America and the Caribbean; human capital; integrated health and nutrition packages; school meals; social protection.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Objectives of school feeding.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Complementary services offered in health.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Complementary services offered in nutrition.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Complementary education programmes implemented as part of school feeding programmes.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Regulatory frameworks in school feeding.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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    1. FAO . Nutrition guidelines and standards for school meals: A report from 33 low and middle-income countries. Rome: (2019) 106.
    1. UNESCO, UNICEF and WFP . Ready to learn and thrive: School health and nutrition around the world. Paris: UNESCO, UNICEF, WFP; (2022).
    1. Bundy DAP, de Silva N, Horton S, Jamison DT, Patton GC. Re-imagining school feeding: A high-return Investment in Human Capital and Local Economies. Washington, DC: World Bank; (2018) License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0 IGO.

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