Mozambique School Lunch Initiative

Over the last five years, I have built the Mozambique School Lunch Initiative from a small pilot program serving three schools (400 students) to a well-established and locally recognized non-profit organization serving ten primary schools and two preschools (over 2,000 students). In the process, the team has learned about how to iterate, how to measure our impact, how to pivot in times of crisis (such as during COVID-19), and how to create credibility among local stakeholders and government. Most importantly, we have seen the tremendous impact the school lunch program has on kids’ nutrition and education.

At this point, the Elevate Prize funding would be the perfect catalyst to take our organization to the next level in terms of scale and visibility. Over the next five years, we aim to expand to 100 schools in Mozambique and 200,000 students. Our organization is now at the right maturity to take on this accelerated expansion and attracting more stakeholder support is critical. The Elevate Prize funding would be directly used to aid our expansion and begin providing much needed nutrition to vulnerable kids. The Prize will also increase our recognition among other funders and potential partners, including the government of Mozambique.

I was born in rural Chokwe, Mozambique, in the same region where the Mozambique School Lunch Initiative is headquartered. For the first twelve years of my life, I grew up in civil war. My family was constantly on the move, fleeing from violence and often spending weeks hiding out in the bush. My schooling was interrupted several times, but my parents strongly believed in the importance of education and ensured that after the war ended, I went all the way to university. After university, I began teaching part-time as an assistant professor while also launching my career in community development with several international organizations. During this time, I spent a lot of time working with vulnerable communities, children with HIV/AIDS, families that were constantly on the cusp of hunger. I saw a lot of well-intended projects come to assist these communities, but they almost always fizzled out after a few years. I constantly asked myself, “how can we make something really last?” This awoke in me a passion to start my own initiative that would be deeply rooted in Mozambique’s local communities with a pathway for long-term sustainability and change. The Mozambique School Lunch Initiative is that vision.

Child malnutrition in Mozambique is extremely pervasive, with 43 percent of children (approximately 15 million) chronically malnourished. Chronic hunger is a chief reason why students regularly miss classes, report poor learning outcomes, and end up dropping out at an early age. In fact, more than half of students drop out of school by the fifth grade. In this way, hunger dramatically affects a child’s future potential – inadequate nutrition stunts their physical and cognitive development and the lack of education prevents them from pursuing jobs and other opportunities as adults. In rural areas, chronic malnutrition is driven by food insecurity and the challenges subsistence farmers face in increasing their production to have enough to feed their families year round.

The Mozambique School Lunch Initiative is addressing this problem by building locally-sourced, community-led school lunch programs in rural Mozambique. Each day at school, students receive a hearty, nutritious school lunch based on local Mozambican recipes and using fresh foods purchased from local farmers. Our integrated approach tackles child nutrition from a short and long-term perspective: through targeted assistance in schools as well as incentivizing more productive agricultural systems by leveraging the school lunch program to create ‘structured demand’ for local farmers..

Around the world, millions of children go hungry each day, with long-term repercussions on the health, education and general wellbeing. From the ground in Mozambique, the primary challenge we see is an implementation gap. Existing, proven solutions all too often are not implemented where they are needed most. Our community-led approach is innovative in that we aim to tackle these implementation challenges head-on by developing capacity from the ground up. Working for other international development organizations in the past, I saw many projects come and go, rarely sustained and with marginal long-term impact. Our goal is to take a fairly straightforward and impactful intervention – school meals – and implement it in such a way that it can be sustained and address the underlying causes of child malnutrition and poor education, rather than just treating the symptoms.

The two main innovations that have made our work successful and more impactful to date are: 

1) A decentralized, community-led approach to providing school meals so that we can serve children in the most remote, poor and vulnerable regions.  

2) Our farmer procurement program, which leverages the school lunch program to generate demand for agricultural products and incentivize increased local production among smallholder farmers.

The Mozambique School Lunch Initiative (MSLI) improves child nutrition by developing high-quality, “home-grown” school lunch programs and transforming agricultural production in local communities. In collaboration with local government, we establish high-quality school lunch programs in rural, underserved communities in Mozambique. These school lunches are typically the first and main meal consumed by students and go a long way in boosting their nutrition so that they can grow and learn. These are some of the most vulnerable children in the world and we believe that they too deserve the fundamental human right of having enough to eat. Each year of additional schooling helps these children have the skills and abilities they need to access future opportunities and break the cycle of poverty. Thanks to the school lunches, not only have attendance rates increased significantly, but pass rates have also gone up by over 20 percent. Enrollment rates have increase by as much as 50 percent after the start of the school lunch program, demonstrating the dramatic appeal of the daily lunches. At the same time, our model sources food products locally, based on highly nutritious traditional meals like bean stews, vegetables and chicken, creating income generating opportunities for local farmers.