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The project aims to improve children’s diets by adopting nutrition guidelines and standards in national school food plans and policies, and promoting effective food education strategies and complementary food environment interventions in school systems. The project also works to incorporate these standards and complementary measures into national legal frameworks and promote social control mechanisms to support the right to food of schoolchildren and adolescents.
Every day, millions of children and adolescents eat while in school, and in many fragile states, school meals form an important part of their diet: it is therefore important that the food provided in schools meets children’s nutritional priorities and is aligned with the possibilities of local food systems.
Nutrition Guidelines and Standards (NGS) are rules, principles and recommendations designed to improve the nutritional quality, quantity and adequacy of school foods and meals. NGS is more than just setting nutrition targets; it requires specific processes to be effective, including collecting and analyzing individual food consumption data, understanding value chains and sourcing possibilities, and identifying regional and local consumption patterns.
NGS therefore has the potential to support the right to food of these often vulnerable groups; however, the necessary process is resource-intensive, requires technical capacity, and involves coordination across different sectors: many low- and middle-income countries are not in a position to do this, or have nutritional standards that need revision. To date, there is no clear process for developing effective nutritional guidelines and standards, nor an internationally agreed approach to doing so. This project aims to address these gaps.
What does this project do?
The project will build a global approach to develop cost-effective, feasible, participatory, context-specific and (food) system-based nutrition guidelines and standards to ensure that school foods meet the nutritional, educational and socio-cultural needs of students. The model will consider aspects such as local availability, food preparation infrastructure, and the social and cultural significance of food to facilitate its use in different food system settings.
In addition, the project will develop other tools and measures, such as food education interventions, food environment policies, etc., to complement NGS, enhance its impact and integrate it into national legal frameworks based on the 2016 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Right to food.
one Online Global Knowledge Center The project has set up a Youth Corner to ensure that the methodologies, guidance products and pilot experiences are widely applied and benefit the targeted institutions and stakeholders. The Hub also serves as a global knowledge base where countries can share experiences, policies and legislative instruments related to NGS for school foods. The Hub has a Youth Corner to enhance participation and give rights holders a voice in such exchanges through stories, videos and case studies, and will also provide an interactive platform for discussion and exchange for countries, organizations and existing networks.
The methodology will be Piloted in Cambodia and Ghana Collaboration with WFP and government stakeholders at subnational level. Capacity building, communication, advocacy and youth engagement strategies at global and country levels will further support and complement the results.
The project aims to achieve two complementary outcomes:
- Promote the adoption of healthy eating habits and consumption of school foods to improve the diets of children and adolescents.
- Raise awareness and knowledge about adequate school meals and food as a legal requirement for the realization of children’s right to food.
The project aims to achieve five outcomes:
- Pilot countries (national level) adopt a food systems approach to develop, strengthen and apply nutrition guidelines and standards and complementary measures.
- (National) Pilot countries have strengthened their capacity to effectively design, implement, evaluate and revise next-generation sequencing and supplementation measures for school foods.
- (Global) Validated methods and complementary tools for designing school food NGS are available to targeted institutions in low- and middle-income countries.
- (Global) The global dialogue around the need, priority, and potential of systems-based NGS for school food has intensified in low- and middle-income countries.
- (Global and National) For low- and middle-income countries, guidance could be developed on incorporating NGS into legal requirements to realize the right to food for children and adolescents.
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