About this Research Topic

Background

The value of school health and nutrition interventions is recognised as a critical investment in the development of school-age children and adolescents with 90% of countries currently implementing some form of school health and nutrition (SHN) programme. SHN programmes can contribute to achieving the goals of “Education for All” by helping children enroll on time, complete their education, and help them realize their full potential, at the same time ensuring that government investment in education is not wasted. Unfortunately, the children who could benefit most are not reached because they are not in school or because existing programmes have low coverage.

There has been a significant increase in this investment in the form of school feeding, which is now one of the world’s most extensive safety nets, with nearly one in every two primary school children receiving a subsidized meal every school day. Over the last decade there has been a dramatic growth in school feeding in Africa, with some 65.9 million children fed in 2022, up from 38.4 million in 2013. The recently formed School Meals Coalition is comprised of 86 member country governments committed to providing a healthy school meal to every child. This commitment goes beyond that to include the provision of complementary school health interventions.

The goals for this research topic are:

• To explore current research and identify good practice in the delivery of familiar, safe, and simple health and nutrition interventions to hard-to-reach children in low and middle income settings.

• To take advantage of the vast platform and current global investment in school meals to explore how to improve the coverage of complementary and mutually reinforcing SHN interventions.

• To explore mechanisms to deliver integrated comprehensive packages by governments and partners at scale in a sustainable manner.

• To explore policy and monitoring and evaluation frameworks that seek to position SHN in mainstream decision making.

Manuscripts are invited that focus on original research, country/regional programming (country case studies) and commentaries that cover:

• Pre-school, school and adolescent age groups;

• Integrated programming and policy;

• School based policies (eg gender, pregnancy, HIV prevention, inclusion);

• Health and nutrition services (eg deworming, vision correction, feeding, nutrition;

• Skill based health (behaviour change) education (eg nutrition, HIV);

• Access to safe water and sanitation;

• Cost effectiveness and investment returns;

• Impact on development, learning, human capital and local/national economies.

Keywords: school, pre-school, adolescents, children, policy, school-based policy, development

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