article · Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems
This research investigated the impact of Home-grown School Feeding Programmes (HGSFPs) on 662 smallholder farmers in Malawi, comparing participants with non-participants. Using various statistical methods, the study found that HGSFP participation roughly doubled agricultural revenue for households, regardless of the household head's gender or age. Beyond income, the programmes also improved household food security and significantly increased voluntary financial contributions to schools. The findings indicate that while income fully mediates the revenue effect, it only partially explains the improvements in food security and hardly any of the increase in school contributions. This suggests HGSFPs function as combined financial and social capital interventions, with benefits extending beyond what traditional income-focused evaluations capture.
This research is important because it highlights that the benefits of school feeding programmes extend far beyond simple income generation. By showing improvements in food security and school support, it demonstrates a broader positive impact on child welfare and community development. This challenges conventional evaluation methods that might underestimate the true value of such interventions.
The abstract describes an evaluation of a development programme rather than a product or technology with a direct commercialisation pathway. It provides insights into the multi-faceted benefits of Home-grown School Feeding Programmes, which could inform policy and programme design for organisations involved in food security, education, and rural development. The abstract does not indicate an application pathway for commercialisation.
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Home-grown school feeding programs (HGSFPs) are expanding across Africa on the assumption that benefits propagate through income: participation raises farm revenue, and richer households invest more in food and schooling. We test this directly using survey data from 662 smallholders in Kasungu District, Malawi (332 non-participants, 330 HGSFP participants, all supplying through the district’s sole cooperative procurement channel). Identification combines a two-step endogenous switching regression with regime-specific inverse Mills ratios as the primary estimator, with three propensity-score-matching algorithms, inverse probability weighting, and entropy balancing as robustness; the estimators converge. Participation roughly doubles agricultural revenue (ATT 0.72–0.88 log points, 106–141%), uniformly across household-head gender and age [ F (3, 651) = 0.48, p = 0.693]. It also improves food security (Household Food Insecurity Access Scale falls 1.79 points) and sharply raises voluntary school contributions (MWK 5,331 per child). Baron–Kenny decomposition shows income mediates 100% of the revenue effect by construction, 23% of the food-security effect, and under 1% of the school-contribution effect. We test several candidate direct channels: participants receive significantly more extension advice and derive a higher farm income share, consistent with a productivity account; we find no evidence for home consumption, credit access, or trust in schools as carriers. HGSFPs, on this evidence, are bundled financial-and-social-capital interventions whose returns extend well beyond the income channel conventional cost–benefit logic captures—and income-only evaluations understate the social return most where the stakes for children are highest.
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DOI: 10.3389/fsufs.2026.1939016
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