School Feeding Programmes, Education and Food Security in Rural Malawi

Roxana Elena Manea

No 63-2020, CIES Research Paper series from Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute

Abstract: Existing investigations of the impact of school feeding programmes on educational outcomes have provided mixed evidence of success. In this chapter, I investigate a potential explanation for this lack of consensus in the literature. I argue that the prevailing food security situation at the time and place of the programme's evaluation plays a major role. I study the case of rural Malawi. I use an instrumental variable approach and propensity score matching to estimate the impact of school feeding on primary school enrolment and retention rates. I focus on villages with overlapping characteristics. I estimate that school feeding has increased enrolments by 7 percentage points on average, but the impact on retention rates has been relatively limited. However, when I distinguish between food-secure and food-insecure areas, not only do I find a larger impact on enrolments in food-insecure areas, but I also uncover a significant increase of around 2 percentage points in the retention rate of students in these same areas. Across the board, impacts are not significant in food-secure areas. I conclude that school feeding programmes bear an impact on education as long as they also intervene to relax a binding food constraint.

Keywords: School feeding programmes; Education; Food security; Malawi (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2021-05-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-edu
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