GNV News, February 4, 2026

On January 27, 2026, the World Health Organization (WHO) set international nutrition standards for school meals and recommended that member states provide meals in line with these standards. As of 2025, about 466 million children worldwide were receiving school meals, but roughly 1 in 10 school-age children and adolescents—188 million in total—are obese, a number that exceeds the number of children who are underweight, according to the current situation described here.

Because children spend most of the day at school, schools are key to shaping healthy, nutritious eating habits, and such diets affect students’ concentration in class, memory, and learning ability, as has been pointed out. However, as of October 2025, only 104 WHO member states had policies in place for healthy school meals, and just 48 countries had introduced policies restricting the sale of foods high in sugar, salt, and unhealthy fats.

To address these school meal issues, the School Meals Coalition was launched at the UN Food Systems Summit held in 2021. The coalition has set an international goal of providing school meals to every child by 2030, and it is supported by UN agencies including WHO. The expansion of school meals can bring major benefits for health and the environment at both the global and national levels. According to one study, providing school meals in areas with food insecurity can reduce undernutrition rates by one quarter, and if these eating habits are maintained into adulthood, more than one million cases of noncommunicable diseases could be prevented each year worldwide. From an environmental perspective, aligning meals with recommended healthy and sustainable diets can help reduce food waste and potentially halve the environmental burden related to food. Economically, it has also been pointed out that local procurement of school meals can provide local farmers with a stable source of income, thereby revitalizing rural economies.

Learn more about food and climate change → “Climate change that harms our food supply”

Learn more about food insecurity → “Global food shortages: the unreported problems”

Children being served school meals (Photo: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting / Wikimedia Commons [Government Open Data License – India (GODL)]