Advancing gender equality in home-grown school feeding programs By Haley Zaremba, Marlène Elias, Natalia Estrada-Carmona, Teresa Borelli, Danny Hunter, and Meghajit Shijagurumayum AN INTRODUCTORY FRAMEWORK Acknowledgements: This work was undertaken as part of the CGIAR Science Program on Policy Innovations, with generous support from the CGIAR Trust Fund Contributors: www.cgiar.org/funders. Suggested citation: Zaremba, H., Elias, M., Estrada-Carmona, N., Borelli, T., Hunter, D., & Shijagurumayum, M. (2025). Advancing gender equality in home-grown school feeding programs: An introductory framework. Bioversity International, Rome. ISBN: 978-92-9255-353-1 Contact details: Haley Zaremba at h.zaremba@cgiar.org Cover photos: ©Ubirajara Machado, Brazil (middle left) ©Association Watinoma, Burkina Faso (bottom left, bottom right) Produced by KANDS Collective hello@kandscollective.com http://www.cgiar.org/funders mailto:h.zaremba%40cgiar.org?subject= mailto:hello@kandscollective.com By improving food and nutrition security for vulnerable children and youth, and, increasingly, providing employment and economic opportunities for local producers and food systems through home-grown and planet-friendly approaches (see Box 1), these programs hold promise for achieving multiple development goals in tandem. The wide reach of school meal systems endows them with significant leverage to advance gender equality on a global scale. Yet, while many school feeding programs are beginning to address gender-specific challenges [1], overall, these efforts have been insufficiently integrated in planning phases, and progress has been inconsistent [3]. This represents a significant shortcoming, as programs that do not consider social factors risk perpetuating or even exacerbating existing inequalities [4]. In contrast, well-designed Introduction programs can provide a strategic entryway for promoting gender equality together with their common goals of “social protection, education, health and nutrition, agricultural and economic growth, and environmental sustainability” [5,6,1, p.9]. In this brief, we propose a framework to conceptualize gender considerations in HGSF programs to inform research, practice, and policy. The framework maps interlinked and localized processes from production through to consumption, and the policy and institutional environments within which school feeding takes place, to identify entry points for gender-responsive programs. We argue that addressing gender issues and inequalities can lead to more holistic programs that advance equality and inclusion alongside other human development and environmental goals. School feeding programs, also known as school meal or school lunch programs, provide one of the biggest social safety nets in the world. With a global budget of at least 67.2 billion USD [1], these programs reached 418 million children, or around half of all school-age children in the world, in 2022 [2]. 3 ADVANCING GENDER EQUALITY IN HOME-GROWN SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMS To deliver subsidized or free meals to students, school feeding programs have historically relied on industrialized supply chains that drive environmental degradation, deliver nutritionally poor food, and only minimally benefit local economies. This model is changing, however. Around the world, programs are broadening their scope, moving beyond basic food provisioning to embrace ecological and economical sustainability and resilience [1]. The resulting home-grown school feeding (HGSF) approaches are leveraging the ‘power of procurement’ [6] to catalyze a food systems shift toward more nutritious and ecologically sustainable foods that can also support the livelihoods of local family farmers [1]. HGSF programs typically require a specified percentage of food (e.g., 45% in Brazil [7]) to be sourced locally from smallholders or their organizations. In so doing, these programs more closely align with the idea of school feeding as a form of social protection [8-10]. Prioritizing local sourcing dovetails with a push for planet-friendly school meals: an extension of HGSF that explicitly targets environmental sustainability throughout the entire school meal supply chain. This approach aims to mitigate common negative ecological impacts of agrifood systems, including resource depletion and biodiversity loss [11-13]. BOX 1: The evolution of school feeding objectives, from food security to food system transformation Most recently, this movement has been refined into a push for regenerative and climate-resilient school feeding, in response to increasing planetary stresses driven by climate change [14]. This broadened scope recognizes the role of school feeding programs in food system transformation, which “follows from the programs’ multisectoral nature, with relevance for social protection, education, health and nutrition, agricultural and economic growth, and environmental sustainability” [1, p.9]. 4 ADVANCING GENDER EQUALITY IN HOME-GROWN SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMS ©Meghajit Shijagurumayum | Bioversity International Although the structure of school feeding programs varies over time and place, Figure 1 offers a prototypical map of the types of actors involved in each phase of HGSF programs, as well as some of the institutions that shape these programs. Following this figure, we unpack the gender dimensions of each phase and provide illustrative examples of programs that have adopted gender- responsive practices, to bring practical opportunities and potential pitfalls to light. We recognize that there is significant diversity among actors within any gender group, and unequal social relations based on factors that interact with gender, such as Indigeneity, ethnicity and caste; age and stage in the life cycle; socio- economic status; and more. When we refer to gender below, we acknowledge the need to consider this context-specific ‘intersectionality’ of factors, which results in some women and girls and some men and boys experiencing multiple, compounding forms of marginalization and exclusion in HGSF programs (and beyond). Mapping gender in home-grown school feeding programs 5 ADVANCING GENDER EQUALITY IN HOME-GROWN SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMS Figure 1. Prototypical map of actors in HGSF programs P ro du ctio n Trade & transport Consumption P rocess in g & prepara tio n Policy, governance and institutional environment   Small-scale/ family farmers   Farmer collectives   Industrial farmers   Local market vendors   Small-scale suppliers   Aggregators and wholesalers   Big agribusiness suppliers   National food reserves   Food aid   Central/commissary kitchen workers   School kitchen workers   Students   Parents   Future generations Production Inequalities and gender-specific barriers are present in all scales of agricultural production, from women’s lack of access to quality lands, agricultural information and inputs, productive resources, and capital, to gender norms that shape the (unequal) gender division of labor, employment and wages, and restrict women’s mobility, among others [15]. HGSFs must recognize and address challenges faced by women producers to avoid exacerbating them. To challenge such inequalities, HGSF can prioritize women farmers and collectives, or farmers associations and farms that adhere to gender- equitable and inclusive policies and practices [16-18] (Box 2). Enabling women and marginalized producers to provide a reliable, quality supply of produce for school meals may require working with other programs and initiatives to strengthen farmers’ capacities through training (in production, organizing, etc.), improved access to information, finance, and resources, and more (see, for example, [15]). The types of food sourced also matter. Demand for culturally familiar, nutrient-dense foods typically produced and managed by women, such as leafy vegetables in Africa, can open market linkages and strengthen women’s incomes and bargaining power in local value chains while enhancing nutritional outcomes for children [19,20]. The food provisioned through HGSF programs can be produced at different agricultural scales, including by large industrial farms, small family farms, and farmer collectives, and/or by students, school faculty, and community members in school and community gardens (Fig. 1). 6 ADVANCING GENDER EQUALITY IN HOME-GROWN SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMS Supporting women producers and collectives through Brazil’s public procurement program Brazil’s National School Feeding Program (PNAE) feeds as many as 45 million children each day. Lauded as a successful example of a large-scale HGSF program, the PNAE requires cities to spend at least 45% of their school meal budget on produce from family farmers, prioritizing formal and informal women’s groups, along with other marginalized producers [7,21]. As of 2023, the PNAE mandates that at least 50% of food purchased from rural families must be registered under a woman’s name [21]. This policy is complemented by a public procurement policy, Programa de Aquisição de Alimentos (PAA) Indígenas, that targets indigenous producers, addresses systemic discrimination against indigenous women, promotes their rights, and recognizes their contributions and the specific challenges they face, such as triple discrimination based on poverty, gender, and ethnicity [22]. Together, these measures have been beneficial for gender equality and social inclusion, as well as ecological outcomes. In a study on the PNAE [23], women producers in households associated with the program showed higher levels of empowerment than women in unassociated households, and women’s influence in household decision-making around production was positively correlated with agrobiodiversity and use of agroecological practices. As such, the empowerment of women producers in the PNAE is part of a virtuous cycle alongside more sustainable production practices. BOX 2: 7 ADVANCING GENDER EQUALITY IN HOME-GROWN SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMS Trade and transport Many programs also source a significant amount of their food from in-kind donations (both domestic and through foreign food aid), and national food reserves [1,24]. In some countries, big agri-food business has an increasing presence in schools and heavily influences procurement pathways and products, contributing to higher prevalence of ultra-processed foods [e.g., 25,26]. In global agrifood systems, women are particularly underrepresented in the transporting and wholesale trading of food, “at least in part because [transport and wholesale] require greater capital, higher mobility and interactions with outsiders” [15, p.36]. These nodes of food supply chains also tend to be better remunerated than nodes where women tend to be concentrated, such as primary production and processing [15,27]. School feeding programs have the potential to create new opportunities for women in historically masculine nodes of food supply chains on a global scale. By supporting the integration of women vendors and transport workers, including through capacity-building and financing, policies and programs can provide more diverse livelihood options for rural women [28]. Alternatively, rural women can be more directly supported when school feeding programs purchase foods directly from women producers or local market vendors rather than from larger-scale intermediaries and big businesses. Depending on their context and the scale, HGSF programs may procure food through direct purchase from farmers and/or from wholesale suppliers, aggregators and distributors, and wet markets and local markets (Fig. 1). 8 ADVANCING GENDER EQUALITY IN HOME-GROWN SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMS Food preparation and catering Depending on the school feeding program policy and context, food preparation and catering may take place in the schools themselves and/or in central commercial (commissary) kitchens that distribute prepared meals to schools (Fig. 1). In rural areas, school feeding programs can offer a critical source of employment to cooks and caterers amid limited remunerated livelihood options [18]. Worldwide, the preparation and cooking of food for school feeding is primarily carried out by women [1]. In a 2022 global review of school feeding programs [29], 32% of programs reported a focus on creating jobs for women, primarily in cooking roles. In a subsequent 2024 review [1], 91% of programs reported that at least half of their cooks/caterers were women, and 30% reported that all were women. All-women cooking staffs were especially common in low- income countries (at 45%) [1]. As cooking is often seen as an extension of women’s reproductive labor, food preparation jobs are frequently more available to rural and poor women than other forms of employment [29]. However, these jobs are sometimes informal, often unpaid or underpaid, and typically undervalued [29-32]. In such cases, this employment may perpetuate rather than reduce gender inequalities [e.g., 31]. However, men may dominate in cooking positions that are formalized and higher paid -- such as in a Delhi case study [33], where men (of unspecified caste) were overrepresented in (better-paying) food preparation in commercial kitchens, whereas low-caste women were overrepresented in (low- paid) cooking and distribution in school kitchens. 9 ADVANCING GENDER EQUALITY IN HOME-GROWN SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMS The “Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Children” program in Lebanon sought to foster the development of two generations of Palestinian refugees by engaging both mothers and children in a two-pronged school feeding program. The program employed Palestinian women through community kitchens to supply schoolchildren with healthy, culturally appropriate snacks in a refugee camp setting [36]. The program had positive and reverberating benefits for entire families. Mothers who participated in the program were able to earn an income and increase food expenditures at home, thereby increasing household food security. Moreover, women involved in the program reported strengthened morale, social support, and decision-making abilities [37], as well as a newfound space “to form social bonds, discuss personal issues and share experiences” [38, p.1]. As Ghattas et al. [36, p.922] note, “the availability of schools as a constant market for these social enterprises offers an opportunity for sustainable livelihood generation and food security gains.” BOX 3: Linking school feeding with marginal women’s employment in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon As school meal programs are large-scale employers of economically marginalized women, they can make a critical difference in the quality of women’s livelihoods, with reverberating benefits for entire households and communities (Box 3). Ensuring that caterers and cooks have favorable employment and working conditions, such as fair wages, stable contracts, and clean and safe kitchens with appropriate equipment and cooking methods—including the use of clean cooking fuels that do not negatively impact women’s health—can create far-reaching benefits for women, their families, and their communities [6,34,35]. Treating food preparation and catering jobs as professional, skilled positions that include capacity- building opportunities and pathways for vocational growth can further contribute to more fulfilling and empowering opportunities for women; but care must be taken to ensure that women retain these positions as conditions improve. 10 ADVANCING GENDER EQUALITY IN HOME-GROWN SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMS At the consumption level, school feeding can have three broad gender-related impacts with gender dimensions, detailed below: a) increasing the food and nutrition security of children and their parents, b) fostering food literacy and creating a positive normative food environment for children, their parents, and communities, and c) increasing enrolment, attendance, and achievement of marginalized students (Fig. 1). As an indirect impact, school feeding can also stimulate demand for production of nutritious and environmentally friendly foods. Consumption School feeding is a critical intervention for students’ nutrition and health, particularly for marginalized groups and girls [39]. Gender inequality is a major driver of food insecurity, and on a global scale, girls and women experience higher levels of malnutrition than boys and men [15,40]. Closing this gap requires meals to meet the particular nutritional needs of both girls and boys. For instance, as of menarche, girls require iron-rich foods to offset iron loss during menses, which can lead to anemia [41]. While fortification and biofortification approaches have been promoted to address nutrient deficiencies, narrowly technocratic approaches alone are insufficient to address nutrition gaps [42,43] and deliver culturally appropriate, safe, sufficient, fresh, and planet- friendly diets [44,45]. For instance, despite the availability of nutritious foods, discriminatory gendered social norms can produce nutritional inequalities. In classrooms as in the home, girls may eat last and eat less due to such norms [46-48]. School feeding can impact food security not only for students, but also for their families. By covering part of students’ daily food needs, school feeding helps ease pressure on families to provide enough food. This can be particularly impactful for mothers, who may skip or reduce their own meals in times of hardship to provide sufficient food for their children [49]. School feeding can also have positive spillover effects for younger siblings, who may have more to eat at home as a result. Moreover, these nutritional benefits can be intergenerational. For instance, in India, mothers who benefitted from school feeding in their youth had children with higher height-for-age z-scores. These effects were more pronounced for poorer mothers, and were supported by an observed association between school feeding exposure and women’s education, fertility, and health service use [50]. A. Food and nutrition security 11 ADVANCING GENDER EQUALITY IN HOME-GROWN SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMS C. Enrolment, attendance, and achievement School feeding can boost school enrolment and attendance of girls and boys by increasing food security, reducing food expenses, and offsetting opportunity costs of sending children to school instead of keeping them home to work. This safety net can play a role in closing gender gaps in enrolment and attendance by providing motivation and incentive to send daughters to school [46,58]. Global data show that school feeding often boosts the enrolment, attendance, and educational outcomes of girls more than boys [16,58-60]. School feeding can also encourage girls’ enrolment in secondary school, typically a dropout flashpoint for girls around the globe [61,62]. The addition of take- home meals can also have an outsized effect on girls’ attendance and enrolment [62,63], even in contexts where girls’ education is less valued than boys’ (see Box 4). Increasing girls’ enrolment and attendance feeds into a virtuous cycle of benefits for current and future generations, as girls’ education is critical to ending child marriage, limiting early and unwanted pregnancies, supporting robust rural economies, and creating healthier societies [64]. Every additional year of formal education enables girls to grow into more empowered women with greater agency and opportunity, with associated community and intergenerational benefits [50,64]. However, intersectionality matters: these B. Food literacy and norms In addition to providing daily meals to students, school feeding programs provide critical exposure to healthy diets at a formative age, potentially kickstarting a virtuous cycle of positive health outcomes and more sustainable eating habits for students in their adulthood [51,52]. School feeding can directly and indirectly build food literacy, or “the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to make informed decisions about food and its impact on health” [51, p. 1]. Because women and girls are generally responsible for feeding their households from an early age, they often develop greater food literacy than men [53-55]. Yet, teaching boys as well as girls about the importance of healthy diets and foods for all can have compounding benefits, as men’s nutritional knowledge can directly benefit the wellbeing of their wives and children [56]. School feeding programs provide a (virtually untapped) opportunity to take a gender- responsive approach to building food literacy. By provisioning healthy diets in sufficient amounts to all children, school feeding can instill the normative acceptability of healthy diets for boys and girls alike. For example, in Ethiopia, some schools are challenging cultural norms that give preference to boys in food provisioning by serving the same portions and types of foods to girls and boys, who then eat together [48]. Some schools also serve girls before boys to challenge cultural norms that stipulate that boys and men should eat first [48]. School feeding can additionally shift norms related to the gender division of labor at mealtimes. In some parts of Ethiopia as well as Japan, schools teach all children to wash their own dishes, a task which is typically culturally assigned to women and girls only [48,57]. Not only is this challenging the gender division of labor for students, but in Ethiopia spillover effects have been reported in the home [48]. As Ngera and Drucza [48, p. 44] note, “Some norms like sitting together to eat, or boys washing dishes might be small but can have a longer-term impact on changing unconscious discriminatory attitudes and power relations.” In this way, school feeding programs can foster an equitable normative food environment for students, their families, and future generations. Pairing school feeding with food and nutrition education – as well as awareness-building around water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), fertility and health – can further reinforce normative shifts related to diets and meal management. 12 ADVANCING GENDER EQUALITY IN HOME-GROWN SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMS 13 ADVANCING GENDER EQUALITY IN HOME-GROWN SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMS outcomes can vary across social groups, and gains in attendance and enrollment may diminish over time for girls in poor families as they age and the opportunity cost of sending them to school grows higher [46,65]. However, girls’ high drop-out rates after primary school (as compared to boys) has been observed in well-off families as well [e.g., 66]. Finally, it cannot be assumed that girls’ increased enrolment and attendance for the sake of school meals will automatically translate to higher valuation of girls’ education (see Box 4). As such, pursuing public information campaigns about the importance of girls’ education as a complement to school feeding programs can be a critical pathway toward keeping girls in school. In addition to supporting the achievements of students, school feeding can open opportunities for mothers and (usually women) caregivers, who typically prepare food within the home. By freeing up time that would otherwise be spent preparing food, these programs can allow these women to pursue other ventures. For example, Wang et al.’s analysis of Chinese census data from 2010 and 2015 [69] found that China’s rural school feeding program significantly enhanced women’s participation in the workforce by 4.25%, with no effect on fathers. India’s Midday Meal Scheme (MDMS) has increased enrolment of girls more than of boys, thereby contributing to closing gender gaps in education [67,68]. The MDMS has also increased attendance rates, particularly for girls [65]. This is critical, as daily attendance for girls in India is thought to be inconsistent, although official attendance data is thin (ibid.). In rural Rajasthan, Garg and Mandal [46, p.158] found that in the poorest families, school meals provide BOX 4: School meals provide incentive for girls’ schooling in rural India incentives to send girls to school even when their education is “regarded [...] as economically futile”. The authors found that “for most of the rural parents, education is synonymous to economic returns. Arguments of education as a means to social development hold no water for them.” The provisioning of school meals thereby offered a powerful intervention to close gender schooling gaps even in an economically marginal and socially disabling environment. ©Meghajit Shijagurumayum | Bioversity International 14 ADVANCING GENDER EQUALITY IN HOME-GROWN SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMS Policy, governance, and institutional environment Nearly every country in the world (87%) offers some form of a school feeding program [70]. These programs are generally headed or co-headed by the departments of education (91% of programs worldwide), health (67%), and agriculture (58%) [1]. An increasing number of these programs are transitioning from a centralized national-level program to a decentralized or semi-decentralized model, managed or co-managed at the regional or local levels [1]. Low-income countries are more likely than high-income countries to use school feeding to target a broad range of objectives, including: meeting nutrition and/or health goals, reducing hunger, meeting educational goals, providing a social safety net, enabling smallholder farmers, meeting agricultural goals, addressing gender- specific challenges, and preventing/mitigating obesity and overweight [1,29]. According to Bundy et al. [70, p. 11], this trend “suggests that school meals carry more weight as a social development strategy in poorer countries where the needs are more complex and resources are scarcer than in more developed countries that have a richer mix of policy tools.” Many school feeding programs include some degree of gender consideration within their policies. Ministries related to gender affairs were considered key decision-makers “responsible for functions of school meal program management” in 11% of the 142 countries included in a 2024 GCNF report on school feeding around the world [1, p. 55]. In that report, the GCNF began tracking “to address gender-specific challenges” as an objective of school feeding programs for the first time, and found that 41% of programs reviewed cited such an objective [1]. These programs reported addressing considerations “such as barriers that especially prevent girls from attending school or continuing their education past the primary level” [1, p. 31]. However, implementation of gender-related objectives may be fragmented, with decision- making and implementation frequently split across ministries as well as across national, regional and local levels. Frequently, the stakeholders responsible for day-to-day program operations (many of whom are women) are not involved in top-down decision-making processes, such as defining nutrition standards, procurement modalities, and budgets [71,72]. This presents key challenges for efforts to make school feeding programs more inclusive. Moreover, countries and regions have varying levels of political commitment and/or capacity to plan for and implement gender-responsive policies due to contextual factors such as budget, strength of relevant institutions, and cultural factors. Brazil’s National School Feeding Program illustrates how statutory councils with civil- society representation can institutionalize shared oversight of menu planning, supplier selection, and budget execution, creating formal channels for gender-balanced participation where political and administrative capacities allow [73]. Few programs, however, include teachers, parents, or community representatives in program decision-making, leaving local actors only partially involved in formal oversight structures [74]. For instance, in the Americas, Robert and Gaddis [32, p. 341] note that “education workers and community members, especially mothers, are often required, or expected, to collaborate with local governmental organizations (e.g. public health and nutrition groups, school food councils) to operate programs. Yet, these important school food stakeholders typically have limited formal opportunities to decide how their programs should be designed, funded, and operated.” Robert and Gaddis [32] also note that young people, the end users of these programs, are sidelined in decision-making. Notable exceptions include mandated youth participation in school food policy discussions in Ecuador [32], initiatives like Youth Food Councils, student-led cooking classes, and direct feedback on menus in Northern Europe [75,76], and participatory pilot programs in the United States (Box 5). While these examples may be gender-blind, the initiatives they describe hold potential to foster gender equality by uplifting the voices of girls as well as boys in school-meal planning. As described, inclusive and gender- responsive governance does not automatically emerge from decentralization but must be intentionally built through clear mandates, resourcing, and accountability mechanisms that recognize local actors, including women and men, as co-decision-makers rather than implementers alone. Moreover, gender and intersectional considerations must be integrated in school feeding policy, at all levels and phases from production to consumption. Integrating ministries, departments, and agencies that focus on gender in decision-making can help address gender concerns together with the ‘main issues’ of education, health, and agriculture. Importantly, securing budgets, institutional capacities, and stable commitments for making school feeding programs gender-responsive requires long-term planning and prioritization [80,81], and alignment of sustainable development efforts across multiple levels. At the global level, school feeding programs can contribute to (and benefit from) international commitments and budgets towards climate mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity conservation, water security, land restoration, and gender equality [82,83]. Finally, monitoring the impacts of school feeding towards these multiple objectives, including gender equality, will require specific indicators, sex- disaggregated and intersectional data, and earmarked budgets. Student participation enhances healthy school meal choices in the United States BOX 5: School feeding is not universal in the United States, where free school meals are provided only to children from families below the nationally determined poverty line, with the option for non-qualifying families to opt in or out of the program. As such, school feeding participation can carry stigma, and many children – and especially teens – may prefer not to consume school meals, even if they are hungry [77]. This represents a key hurdle for nutrition targets, as school meals are often the healthiest meal some children eat each day [78]. Giving voice and agency to youth, and especially teens, of all genders could help solve this problem. A 2022 survey [77] found that 87% of teens said they would be more likely to participate in the school feeding program if their school gathered feedback from their peers about how to improve the program. Accordingly, some states and school districts are experimenting with new and creative ways to involve students in school feeding decision-making and design at the school level to enhance program participation as well as healthier school meal choices. In Montana, for example, middle schools and high schools are integrating youth perspectives into School Lunch Advisory Councils (SLACs), which are made up of one food service director, one educator, and two to three students who “work together toward a goal of implementing simple, low-cost strategies to encourage students to make healthier choices in the cafeteria” [79, n.p.]. In one high school, SLAC students helped to redesign the flow of the cafeteria, repositioning the salad bar for better access and convenience. The students also helped to create posters encouraging the selection and consumption of fruits. According to a USDA blog on the intervention [79, n.p.], “This simple change increased the number of students making selections from the salad bar by 50 percent.” 15 ADVANCING GENDER EQUALITY IN HOME-GROWN SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMS Conclusion Figure 2. Gender considerations in HGSF programs Gender-based barriers in production GAP:   Supporting women’s trade and transport agribusinesses   By-passing large-scale aggregators and linking directly with women producers ENTRY POINTS: Frequent exclusion of women in trade and transport GAP:   Improved employment conditions and salaries for women in school kitchens   Safeguard women’s jobs as conditions improve ENTRY POINTS: Poorly remunerated jobs and poor working conditions for women cooks GAP:   Supporting and purchasing from women farmers, their collectives, and farmer associations with gender-equitable practices   Sourcing foods produced and managed by women ENTRY POINTS: P ro du ctio n Trade & transport Consumption P rocess in g & prepara tio n Policy, governance and institutional enviro nm en t   Gender integration in school feeding policy and agrifood-related sectoral policies.   Active inclusion of women, youth, and civil society organizations in program decision- making   Early and continued gender integration in planning backed by adequate funding, institutional capacities, monitoring, and accountability mechanisms ENTRY POINTS: Gender equality is inadequately addressed in school feeding policy and governance GAP: Gender inequality in food and nutrition security and education GAP:   Nutritious meals that address boys’ and girls’ dietary needs   Gender-responsive food literacy and equitable food norms   Free and take-home meals to keep girls in school ENTRY POINTS: 16 ADVANCING GENDER EQUALITY IN HOME-GROWN SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMS Gender considerations, summarized in Figure 2, are relevant at every phase of school feeding programs, from policymaking to production, trade and transport, preparation and processing, and consumption. A gender-blind approach to school feeding programs is a missed opportunity to achieve far-reaching equitable outcomes across multiple sectors through one of the largest social safety nets on the planet.   This brief and framework can help identify gender considerations and entry points in school feeding programs to advance gender equality through improved agrifood livelihoods, enhanced nutrition and educational achievements, and increased voice in governance for all genders.   Integrating gender considerations in rural development (e.g., agricultural, economic) and education policies and programs more generally, and supporting them with earmarked budgets and accountability mechanisms, will create enabling conditions and prop up efforts to develop gender-responsive school feeding programs.   By taking such an approach, school feeding can achieve its promise to build stronger, healthier, and more equal societies for this and future generations. ©Meghajit Shijagurumayum | Bioversity International 17 ADVANCING GENDER EQUALITY IN HOME-GROWN SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMS References 1. 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