Abstract
Home-grown school feeding programs can make food systems more resilient by stabilizing local markets through a large and predictable demand. Governments and UN agencies like the World Food Programme (WFP) increasingly rely on domestic procurement for school meal programs (as opposed to imported foods), connecting local farmers to markets through cooperatives and aggregators, and enhancing their capacity to meet the quality and volume requirements of school meal contracts. However, there is limited evidence quantifying the impact of such programs on smallholder farmers.
This impact evaluation is studying a farmer support package provided by WFP in the context of a school meals program in Madagascar. The farmer support and school meals programs are part of the World Bank's Food Systems Resilience Program (FSRP) implemented in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock. In this evaluation, we aim to quantify the impact of an agricultural support package provided to farmer cooperatives who are targeted for supplying food into the school meals program. The support package includes agricultural inputs, trainings on production, harvesting, storage, and marketing, and infrastructure including mechanized tools and storage facilities. Outcomes of interest include farmer practices, productivity, sales, and revenues, and food security.
The primary research question of the evaluation is: to what extent does the provision of agricultural interventions from the program contribute to farmers’ outcomes and their integration into the home-grown school feeding program supply chain?