Assessing the impacts of home-grown school feeding programmes

Globally, millions of children receive meals at school through home-grown school feeding (HGSF) programmes that link school feeding programmes with local smallholder farmers. Countries such as Brazil, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria have undertaken HGSF initiatives. However, with a few exceptions, there is a dearth of empirical evidence on the effectiveness and economic sustainability of such programmes. This evidence gap is due to the innate difficulties of applying standard impact evaluation approaches to complex programmes that combines two interventions, each of which has specific target populations. This chapter aims to support practitioners by providing methodological guidelines for conducting rigorous impact assessments of HGSF programmes. It presents an overview of the main technical issues to be addressed, depending on the characteristics of the context and of the intervention itself. The chapter focuses on the methodological challenges related to the estimation of the effects of HGSF interventions on farmers.