Ethiopia, Food for Education and Child Nutrition 2019-24: Evaluations

This decentralized evaluation was commissioned by the WFP Ethiopia Country Office in line with programme requirements for a five-yar school feeding project funded by the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Programme of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). This evaluation follows a baseline assessment conducted in 2021, and precedes an endline evaluation planned for 2025. The project supports McGovern-Dole's strategic objectives concerning improved literacy of school-age children and increased use of health and dietary practices. Additional important objectives are to improve the income and resilience of food-insecure households, and strengthen government capacity to manage and extend school feeding. The project provides school meals for primary schools (grades 1-8) and pre-primary children (grade “0” on the same sites, targeting to feed 200,000 children from 450 schools (tapering down to each year) within Afar Region and two Zones of Oromia Region (Borana and East Hararghe) with a total budget of USD 28,373,187.50.

Key Findings & Conclusions:

• Overall, in this challenging context, school feeding provided a critical and significant safety net for children and their families, and in particular for girls. Significant efficiency and effectiveness gains can be further enhanced from qualitatively strengthening school feeding delivery, with consistent attention to school meal preparation, monitoring and support, and recognizing that transition support will be a long-term endeavor.
• Relevance: At mid-term, the project objectives and targeting remain highly relevant and aligned with government and donor policies. Unfavourable changes in the context increased food insecurity in the target areas, make implementation more difficult, but also increased the value of school feeding to direct beneficiaries and their households. The menu was appropriate, but progress towards diversifying it with fresh foods was limited. The overall theory of change remained sound, but many of its underlying assumptions, especially related to government and community contributions, were optimistic at design stage and have become more unrealistic due to subsequent contextual events.
• Effectiveness & Efficiency: While there are challenges to project quality, including wide variation in the quality of cooking/dining facilities and shortages of non-food items, the project was found to be delivering benefits in terms of food security and resilience for children and their families, and that it provided a significant incentive for enrolment and attendance, including for girls. The project broadly achieved its beneficiary and school coverage targets, but has fallen significantly short of its targets for delivering school meals, primarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated disruptions and school closures. The use of take-home rations (THR) was highly appropriate, but represented a second-best solution to avoid food wastage. WFP’s takeover of responsibility for transporting food to schools going forward is likely to increase the timeliness of delivery and reduce costs. Results from an early grade reading assessment (EGRA) confirmed low level literacy in early grades, especially in Afar and highlighted lower attainment for girls in both regions. While the programme was found to have a positive influence on girls’ education in pastoralist communities and is credited with changing community attitudes to girls’ education, serious inequities persist and progress towards inclusive education is limited, exacerbated by pandemic and conflict related crises.
• Sustainability: Capacity development is central to the programme design, and while both government and local communities have demonstrated strong commitment to school feeding, handovers to government have been limited. It will be many years before Ethiopia is able to sustain a high quality school feeding programme in pastoralist areas without external support.

Stemming from these findings and conclusions, the evaluation made three focused recommendations:

1. For the remainder of the project WFP and partners should focus on maximising the efficiency of the delivery of school meals and preparing for a smooth transition to successor programmes.
2. Feed lessons from this project into the design of its successor and into the design and implementation of other school feeding programmes across Ethiopia.
3. Take short-term actions to strengthen the project’s monitoring and evaluation. These are important not only to strengthen the evidence base for the endline evaluation, but also to establish a better foundation for M&E of any future McGovern-Dole programmes in Ethiopia.