– Gordon Brown and Kevin Watkins
Gordon Brown, a former prime minister of the United Kingdom, is UN Special Envoy for Global Education and Chair of Education Cannot Wait. Kevin Watkins, a former CEO of Save the Children UK, is a visiting professor at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa at the London School of Economics.
EDINBURGH – When governments adopted the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, they pledged to eliminate hunger and poverty. But today, as the SDGs’ 2030 deadline approaches, a gulf separates their initial ambition and the reality on the ground. The 2020s are shaping up to be a lost decade for development – and the world’s most vulnerable children are bearing the brunt of this slowdown.
The future envisaged by the SDGs is drifting out of reach. In 2030, some 620 million people are projected to live in extreme poverty (defined by the World Bank as an income below $2.15 per day). Progress toward the eradication of hunger stalled over a decade ago. At the current pace, there will be 582 million people living with chronic undernutrition in 2030 – the same number as a decade ago, when the SDGs were adopted.
This widening gap between ambition and achievement disproportionately affects young people under 18. Children account for around one-third of the global population, but more than half of the world’s poor. Currently, 237 million of the 333 million children living in extreme poverty are in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) According to our estimates, based on UN and World Bank projections, that number will increase to 326 million by 2030.
Undernutrition is taking a devastating toll. In the world’s poorest countries, around 258 million children are living with hunger – 56 million more than in 2015. For these children, hunger is not an occasional source of stress but a grinding reality of daily life. Chronic undernutrition means that millions of children are affected by stunting – one of the major risk factors for impaired brain development. Stunting rates are falling, but at just one-quarter of the rate needed to achieve the SDG targets; they remain over 30% in South Asia and SSA. At the current rate of progress, there will be 36 million more children living with stunting than there would be if the SDG for hunger were met.
Poverty and hunger have devastating effects on educational outcomes and social mobility. Some 84 million children are at risk of being out of education by the 2030 deadline, undermining progress toward universal education. Without an education, adolescents are often forced into work and early marriage, dashing their hopes of a better future. And hunger in the classroom is a powerful impediment to concentration and learning.
Too often, discussions about the SDGs descend into futile hand-wringing over disappointing progress. But hand-wringing is a luxury poor and hungry children can ill afford. They need practical policies that can make a difference in their lives by 2030. To that end, we are advocating a major initiative to achieve universal school meals in the poorest countries, backed by a new global funding mechanism.
Programs in India, Brazil, and many other countries have shown that providing a meal in school improves nutrition, allows children to learn free from the debilitating effects of hunger, and is the most cost-effective way to reduce child poverty. For the poorest families, a school meal is an in-kind transfer that eases pressure on the household budget, making it possible to keep children in education. As a result, school meals increase enrollment and reduce dropout rates, especially among the poorest children. They also enable children to learn more. Ghana’s large-scale school meal program led to learning outcomes equivalent to an additional year of schooling.
Procurement of school meals has the added benefit of creating economic opportunities for rural communities, where some 80% of the extreme poor live. In Brazil, one-third of the school-meals budget is earmarked for smallholder farmers, linking healthy diets for children to more resilient and sustainable livelihoods.
According to research by the Sustainable Finance Initiative of the Free School Meals Coalition, providing another 236 million children in the world’s poorest countries with free school meals would cost $3.6 billion per year until 2030. Much of that funding could come from developing-country governments, but an additional $1.2 billion annually in outside aid would be needed.
Current development assistance falls well below this amount and is hopelessly fragmented. Instead of investing in the development of national programs, donors throw aid around like confetti, funding small-scale, disconnected projects that often fail to deliver lasting results. Only a small amount of aid – around $280 million annually – goes toward school feeding, and most of this comes in the form of food aid provided by the United States, which is less efficient and far less effective than buying food from local farmers.
There is an alternative. Global health funds – most notably Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria – pool donor resources around a shared purpose, supporting national development plans and raising revenue through three-year replenishments and innovative financing mechanisms.
These principles should underpin a new global initiative for school meals. Momentum for change is already building. The Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, led by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has identified school feeding as a priority, while the World Bank has pledged to make it a central plank of a wider strategy to strengthen social safety nets worldwide. More than 100 governments have joined the School Meals Coalition working to achieve universal school-meal provision by 2030, and some countries, including Indonesia, Nepal, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Honduras, have drawn up their own ambitious plans.
Under the leadership of Raj Shah, the Rockefeller Foundation has invested significantly in the School Meals Impact Accelerator, which provides technical support to countries trying to scale up their programs. The Accelerator’s initial goal is to reach 150 million children by 2030 – more than double the number currently receiving school meals in low-income and lower-middle-income countries.
The challenge now is to bring these initiatives together to expand their reach, making them more than the sum of their parts. A good first step would be to create a clearinghouse through which governments can submit school-feeding proposals and donors can pool and coordinate their funding.
As the final countdown toward the SDGs’ 2030 deadline begins, we must develop practical, achievable, and affordable initiatives that can transcend political polarization and deliver results that remind the world of what is possible. Universal school meals can do just that.
Gordon Brown, a former prime minister of the United Kingdom, is UN Special Envoy for Global Education and Chair of Education Cannot Wait. Kevin Watkins, a former CEO of Save the Children UK, is a visiting professor at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa at the London School of Economics.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025.
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