Improving teacher involvement and cook performance for a national school feeding programme

kenya-student

SECTOR

Social aid | Investment

PROJECT TYPE

Field Experiments

DOI

Location

BEHAVIORAL THEME

Salience
OVERVIEW

The aim here was to enhance teacher involvement and improve cook performance within a national school feeding program in Tanzania. The National Home Grown School Feeding Program (NHGSFP) faced challenges in ensuring effective program accountability and community engagement. Teachers lacked awareness of cook expectations, while parents had limited visibility into meal quality. The project aimed to design interventions that address these challenges and enhance the delivery of the program.

THEMATIC AREAS

The interventions focused on community engagement and cook support. The primary intervention involved providing cooks with informational aprons to improve their understanding of the program. However, while the aprons positively impacted teachers’ understanding, they did not lead to changes in the cooks’ behavior. Furthermore, the project highlighted a lack of understanding and agreement among cooks regarding the exclusive service of specific pupils, indicating the need for universal acceptance of guidelines to ensure their effective enforcement.

Overall, the project demonstrated the complexity of achieving behavioral change and ownership within the school feeding program. While enhancing understanding through interventions like the informational aprons is valuable, it also emphasized the importance of broader community engagement and consensus-building to ensure successful program implementation.