National School Feeding Policy.

This Policy moves from the consideration that the country needs an improved and updated version of school feeding, pursuing a homegrown model, through a vision of a sustainable school feeding program that ensures nutritious and healthy school meals to children using food produced and processed by local producers. The Policy’s goal is the improvement of children's nutritional status and the promotion of the holistic development of local farmers, producers, and the community by treating school feeding as a sustainable and multisectoral investment program; the long-term objective of this Policy is to ensure that school feeding contributes to the vision, mission, and goals of the Government as articulated in the Mid-Term National Development Plan (MTNDP) and the Education Sector Plan (ESP).
On this basis, the Policy establishes specific objectives that school feeding pursues in the following sectors: education, in order to increase the regular school attendance and the comprehensive home-grown school feeding into the education system; health and nutrition, through the reduction of chronic and acute malnutrition; agriculture, by the increased national food production and processing, and the improved competitiveness among local small producers; rural development, through the enhancement of food value chain and the increasing commercially marketed food products and access to markets; social development, through the improved social living conditions of the poorest segment of the population, by reducing economic gaps, inequalities, and disparities among the communities.