The Solution To Transforming Africa’s Food Systems May Already Be In Front Of Us
By Mehrdad Ehsani, Vice President of Regenerative School Meals at The Rockefeller Foundation.
After four days of conversations in Kigali about how Africa can nourish its people, create jobs and build more resilient food systems, I left the Africa Food Systems Forum with one question: What if part of the solution is already sitting in front of us?
The Forum reinforced a simple lesson: food-systems transformation cannot be the responsibility of one ministry or sector. Agriculture, nutrition, health, education, finance, climate and economic development are too closely connected to remain in separate siloes. Regenerative school meals show what becomes possible when these systems work together.
Why school meals matter now
Suggest one sentence: Governments in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) already finance 91% of school feeding programmes, making the challenge not one of mobilizing support but of optimizing this existing public investment.
School feeding is rightly viewed as an intervention that achieves social protection, education, and nutrition goals. But it can also advance a country’s agricultural, economic, and food-systems aspirations. How school meal programs are designed determines who produces it, where value is created, which farming practices are rewarded, and what children eat.
The data is clear: nutritious meals help children learn and remain in school. Evidence from 32 Sub-Saharan African countries found that combining school meals with take-home rations increased girls’ enrolment by 12%. When programmes source locally, the same investment can also create reliable demand for farmers and strengthen domestic food markets.
Rwanda illustrates the potential. A pilot launched in 2021 by The Rockefeller Foundation, the World Food Programme and Vanguard Economics introduced fortified wholegrain maize meal to 13,765 students in 18 schools. It has since expanded, and 396,000 students now consume foods made with fortified wholegrain flour in 357 schools.
Thinking beyond the plate
A well-designed school meal programme can improve children’s diets while creating predictable demand for locally produced food. In every village, there is a school, a child, and a farmer. The opportunity is to connect them deliberately.
Solid’Africa is demonstrating how this can work in Rwanda. Its public nutrition model integrates local supply chains, clean cooking, and efficient logistics to serve schools and hospitals. Its central and decentralized kitchen currently serve 29,000 children per day, with menus featuring diverse local and indigenous crops. The organisation is working to source at least 70% of its ingredients from farmer cooperatives.
This gives farmers something too many lack: certainty. Instead of producing with the hope of finding a market, they can plan around an assured institutional buyer during the school year. Solid’Africa has provided more than 12 million meals and engaged around 7,000 farmers, with more than 5,500 transitioning to regenerative practices. Farmer incomes have risen from roughly US$117 to US$295 annually through productivity gains, lower post-harvest losses and better prices.
Creating markets for regenerative agriculture
Regenerative agriculture cannot scale without demand. School feeding programmes can provide one of the largest and most predictable public markets for nutritious, locally produced food. Reliable markets make better farming an economic proposition as well as an environmental one.
The logic is straightforward: farmers gain viable markets; children receive more nutritious diets; local businesses benefit; and food systems become more resilient. In Kenya, leaders in Murang’a County—the first county to develop an agroecology strategy—are creating a framework to link school feeding programmes with farmers producing food regeneratively.
Learning from Africa and beyond
Across Africa, countries are beginning to connect nutrition, procurement and agricultural production. In addition to Rwanda expanding fortified wholegrain flour and institutional food systems, Kenya’s School Meals Aggregator model consolidates produce from smallholder farmers, manages quality and logistics, and supplies institutional buyers. Ghana is also exploring stronger local procurement.
Brazil offers another important lesson. Its school feeding system serves millions of learners and mandates that at least 45% of the school feeding budget be used to purchase food from family farmers and traditional communities. Africa should not simply replicate Brazil’s model, but it can adapt the principles behind it: clear policy, coordinated procurement and reliable markets for farmers.
South-to-South learning can help governments understand why a model worked and adapt it to local realities. The WFP Centre of Excellence is available to provide technical support in designing school feeding programmes, while lessons from Rwanda, Kenya, Ghana and other countries can be shared across borders.
From promising models to scale
Moving from promising examples to national systems will require political leadership in five areas.
- Break down siloes. Agriculture, education, health, finance, environment and local government should plan, budget and implement around shared outcomes.
- Mobilise sustainable financing. Governments already fund most school feeding, but health taxes and other domestic mechanisms can help protect and expand investment. Since 2017, at least 133 countries have introduced or increased health taxes on tobacco, alcohol and sugar-sweetened beverages. São Tomé and Príncipe applies a 12.5% tax on alcohol and sweetened beverages to support school feeding; Bolivia finances more than 85% of its school meals budget through hydrocarbon taxes; and Guatemala allocates 0.8% of VAT revenue to its programme.
- Use procurement strategically. Public purchasing can create demand for local, nutritious and sustainably grown food, while farmers receive the finance, inputs, water, energy, storage, technology and logistics needed to supply consistently.
- Measure what matters. Data should capture not only meals served, but also nutrition, health, learning, farmer incomes, local economic activity and environmental outcomes.
- Share and adapt what works. Scaling should spread effective principles—not impose a single model everywhere.
The opportunity is already here
I left AFSF thinking about how often we search for entirely new solutions to Africa’s food-system challenges. Yet much of what we need may already exist. We already invest public money in school meals. We already have farmers producing food. We already have markets and supply chains that can be strengthened.
The task is to connect these pieces. If we do, one investment can nourish children, keep girls in school, create reliable markets for farmers, strengthen local economies and support more resilient production.
For Agriculture Ministers, leadership means more than owning one part of the puzzle. It means bringing ministries and partners around the same table, aligning policies and financing, holding systems accountable and championing the deliberate integration of regenerative school feeding into national agricultural strategies.
We do not have to choose between nourishing children, supporting farmers, and building resilient food systems. The opportunity is to make one investment work harder for all three. The solution may already be in front of us.