Intervention(s)
In Burundi, the World Food Programme (WFP), in partnership with the Government of Burundi, provides daily nutritious meals and snacks to over 660,000 school children (331572 girls and 331570 boys) in May 2022 in 873 schools through its Home-Grown School Feeding programme (HGSF). Currently, Burundi WFP Country Office’s (CO) school feeding model is based on a centralised procurement model, where WFP procures food mostly internationally and delivers it to schools. The meals comprise a combination of imported and local food such as cereals, beans and peas and parents contribute to food preparation on a rotational basis.
Starting in 2022, the Burundi CO is piloting a new decentralised school feeding procurement modality based on cash transfers to schools. Under this new Commodity Voucher (CV) procurement model the WFP will make a transfer to the Direction Provinciale de l'Education (DPE), which will purchase from local cooperatives, and cooperatives will deliver food directly to schools.
This lean impact evaluation (IE) will use a randomised controlled trial (RCT) design to assess whether the CV procurement model impacts the performance of meal distribution by schools (e.g., quantity, diversity, quality of meals). It will also compare quantities of food procured across the two treatment models and provide descriptive evidence of the efficiency and reliability of the new procurement system.
The lean IE will also include a pilot survey with cooperatives and farmers to measure productivity, revenues, and profits from farming, and a pilot survey with school children to measure individual diet diversity, meal satisfaction, school performance and cognitive ability. However, the cooperative outcomes are not evaluated experimentally because the scale of the programme and the number of available cooperatives is small. Instead, the results from the pilot survey will inform the feasibility and design of a larger scale IE with the aim to assess the impact of HGSF on farmers' income and children's learning, health, and nutritional outcomes during scale-up.