School Meals, Educational Achievement and School Finance in KenyaPDF version
High rates of primary school absenteeism constitute a serious impediment to economic growth in the developing world. In 2000, an estimated 88 million children were out of school, most of them in Southern Asia and Africa, creating an ill-prepared workforce for an advancing economy. One of the measures taken by many governments to encourage school attendance is the provision of government-subsidized school meals. Such programs are predicated on the idea that better nutrition leads to better educational achievement, and subsidized meals attract a high number of additional children to attend school. But despite the popularity and low cost of school meals, there is little evidence on their impact on school participation and educational achievement.
The Kenyan Government has been supportive of preschool education, developing a preschool curriculum and providing teacher training. But budget constraints prevent the government from supporting these schools in other ways. Parents pay fees that fund the teacher’s salary, classroom materials and other expenses. Thus, rural schools usually have low levels of funding because parents’ income is often also low. Approximately half of preschool teachers cannot read or write, and less than half have attended formal training. Furthermore, they fail to even come to school an average 30 percent of the time. In addition to this unpromising preschool setting, children in Western Kenya may miss school due to malnutrition and hunger, with 39 percent of children in the Busia and Teso districts exhibiting stunted growth. As a result of these conditions, only about 30 percent of Kenyan children age 4-6 attend preschool, and those that do are absent over half of the time.
Researchers evaluated a school meal program implemented by Dutch NGO International Child Support (ICS) in the Busia and Teso districts of Western Kenya, seeking to quantify the effects of school meals in preschools. ICS funded the provision of a school breakfast in 25 of 50 informal preschools, which consisted of a cup of porridge made from protein rich flour, sugar, corn oil and water. While porridge is a common meal for both children and adults in Kenya, the variety served by ICS was sweeter and more nutritious than the average porridge served.
ICS provided the ingredients and a paid cook to the schools, while parents were responsible for firewood to cook the meal and a cup for each child. In practice, this meant that after the program began, parents paid approximately 60 percent more for a day of their child’s preschool in treatment schools.
Researchers gathered data throughout the two year program, comparing school attendance, cognitive and curricular test scores, and other characteristics at the start of the program with data collected at the end, as well data from the 25 schools who did not receive in-school breakfasts.
Impact on School Participation: Children who were not observed in school prior to the program were 4.6 percentage points more likely to be in school if they belonged to the treatment group as opposed to the comparison group. Child attendance was 30 percent higher in the treatment group, both among children who were previously enrolled and children who enrolled in school because of the program.
Impact on Learning: The increased participation rates in treatment schools created overcrowding, increasing the teacher-student ratio substantially. The observed number of students per teacher in treatment schools was 34, compared to 27 in comparison schools and at baseline. The program did improve learning, but these improvements were in the area of curricular achievement, not cognition, suggesting the effect was due to increased attendance, not nutrition. This is supported by the fact that while the program did increase boys’ average weight, there was no effect on girls (height or weight) or boys’ height.
These learning improvements were observed only in schools where the teachers were more experienced at the onset of the program. This implies that the context in which schools meals are implemented is very important – a program that increases school participation in an environment with low teaching quality is not likely to translate into better educational outcomes
Impact on School Finance: After the start of the program, over half of the comparison schools began implementing their own school meal program with funding from parents. Some children who had a choice between schools transferred from comparison schools to treatment schools, driving up the price of treatment schools and down the price of comparison schools, thus the subsidized meals ended up costing the same as parent provided meals in comparison schools. If school meals were offered globally, one would expect the prices to be approximately equal in all schools, because there would be no transfers due to the selective availability of school meals.
