1. Background and Rationale

Proper nutrition is fundamental to the health, growth, and cognitive development of children. During childhood and adolescence, adequate nutrition fuels not only physical maturation but also brain development, which is essential for learning, emotional regulation, and social functioning. Numerous studies have linked good nutritional status with improved academic performance, school attendance, and attentiveness in the classroom (Mukhamedzhanov et al., 2023; Llamas et al., 2025). Moreover, nutrition in early life has long-term impacts on early adult health, educational attainment, and lifetime income, making it a critical investment in human capital and economic development (Lundborg et al., 2022).

School meals programs are increasingly viewed as one of the most scalable and effective mechanisms to improve children’s health and nutrition while simultaneously advancing education, agriculture, and social protection goals (Pastorino et al., 2023). Globally, school meal programs reach nearly 420 million children on most school days, with a budget of USD 48 billion, making them the largest human development interventions (Bundy et al., 2024). In addition to improving nutrition, school feeding programs have been shown to increase school attendance, enhance academic performance, and reduce drop-out rates, particularly among girls (Appiah, 2024). Beyond their direct impact on children, school meal programs can serve as levers for transforming food systems. When designed with sustainability in mind, they can stimulate local agriculture, support smallholder farmers, and promote agrobiodiversity. Linking school meal procurement to local, planet-friendly food production can reduce the carbon footprint of meals, encourage regenerative farming practices, and enhance local food sovereignty (Pastorino et al., 2023). Planet-friendly school meals, when coupled with food education and community engagement, also have the potential to influence food cultures. Schools are powerful settings for cultivating lifelong dietary habits. They also shape social norms related to sustainability.

Across ASEAN Member States, school meals programs take diverse forms, varying in coverage, scale, and implementation models. However, they often function in isolation, with limited cross-country coordination, resource-sharing, or exchange of best practices, constraining their full potential to support ASEAN’s socio-cultural agenda, particularly in building human capital and enhancing well-being. To harmonize efforts and foster regional collaboration, the ASEAN Secretariat launched in August 2024 the Minimum Standards and Guidelines for the ASEAN School Nutrition Package, targeting children aged 3–18 years attending schools. These guidelines offer a shared framework for developing healthy food environments and delivering nutrition education, outlining the rationale, key components, and minimum standards for program design, implementation, monitoring, and enforcement. Further momentum was generated during the School Meals Coalition Regional Summit held in Siem Reap, Cambodia, in November 2024, where ASEAN Member States adopted a Declaration of Intent (Schools Coalition Summit, 2024). This declaration prioritizes actions to strengthen school meal programs by ensuring resilience to shocks such as climate and economic crises, promoting coherent, integrated national policies, enhancing domestic financing, and implementing school nutrition standards.

The landscape analysis aims to conduct a regional landscape review of school meals in ASEAN Member States. This will inform ASEAN decision-making in relation to school-meals initiatives and recommend and support the more effective public policies that promote the well-being and primary needs of school children who are the future guardians of sustainable development of the region. This study will complement The State of School Feeding Worldwide 2022, published every two years by the United Nations, focusing primarily on the unique needs of ASEAN countries, considering their socio-cultural contexts and policy environments.

More specifically, the landscape analysis seeks to:

1. Assess the current state of school meal programs in each ASEAN Member State through a comprehensive review of program coverage, design, financing schemes, procurement systems, and other complementary interventions like the resilience measures adopted to respond to shocks such as natural disasters and pandemics.
2. Document good practices in the implementation of school meal programs in the ASEAN Member States and the ASEAN region as a whole,  and compare these with globally renowned good practices in terms of effectiveness, scalability, and relevance to diverse local contexts.
3. Engage government agencies, development partners, and other key actors to identify and confirm each country’s commitments and priorities under the School Meals Coalition, and determine their potential involvement in regional engagements, and collaboration on school meals.
4. Synthesize at the regional level, based on the data, information, and insights collected, the challenges and opportunities, recommendations for policy reforms and institutional strengthening, and other actionable interventions to ensure more effective and harmonized school meals programs across ASEAN.