Cardiff School of City and Regional Planning

The advent of the Home Grown School Feeding initiative signals a wholly new era in the history of school feeding in developing countries and it has been triggered by a unique set of local and global circumstances. Conventional debates about school feeding tend to frame the issue in somewhat narrow terms, as though it were simply about nutrition and school attendance. Although these are indeed critically important dimensions, the Home Grown School Feeding initiative needs to be understood in a much broader context - the context of climate change and globalization - if its laudably ambitious goals are to be met. Far from being just about school food, the Home Grown School Feeding initiative embodies the entire drama of development in microcosm. To see the initiative in its true light - to appreciate the macro-level complexities as well as the micro-level nuances – is ‘to see the world in a grain of sand’ in William Blake’s immortal words. This report evaluates and contributes to the Home Grown School Feeding initiative by providing: (a) a global review of the initiative to identify best practices with respect to governance, financing and procurement and (b) a set of desk studies of existing programmes in Brazil, Ghana, India, South Africa, Thailand and UK.