A Meal for the Child: Eight Nutrition Programs for Schools, Mothers and Young Children

The United States opened the story in 1946, when President Truman signed the National School Lunch Act. Its supporters pointed to wartime findings that malnutrition had disqualified a significant share of young men from military service, and the program now reaches roughly 30 million children on a typical school day.

Brazil's School Meal Campaign began in 1955 under President Vargas, after nutrition scientists had put school meals on the political agenda. It was renamed the National School Feeding Program in 1979, and a later reform required a share of the food to come from family farms, which made it a reference model for other countries.

WIC, established in 1974, moves the focus from the classroom to the household. It gives supplemental foods, nutrition education and breastfeeding support to low-income pregnant, postpartum and breastfeeding women, and to infants and children up to age five who are at nutritional risk.

India launched this program on October 2, 1975, bundling supplementary nutrition with health checkups, immunization, referral services and non-formal preschool education for children under six and their mothers. It works through community-based Anganwadi centres, of which there were more than 1.24 million by the end of 2010.

Glass of Milk began on March 30, 1984 as a Lima municipal initiative, and Peru's Congress made it national policy by Law No. 24059 later that year. It grew out of neighborhood Mothers Clubs, and its local committees, largely run by women, distribute a daily ration prioritized for children aged 0 to 6 and pregnant women.

Launched in 1994 as one of the new government's Reconstruction and Development Programme lead projects, this program was first called the Primary School Nutrition Programme. Today the Department of Basic Education provides one meal a day to learners in the poorest 60 percent of public schools, Quintiles 1 to 3, with the aim of supporting learning as well as health.

Ghana started its program in 2005 as a pilot providing food to children at school, run by a national secretariat with partners including the World Bank, the World Food Programme and UNICEF. Its meals are prepared by a network of caterers and cooks, most of them women, and its short-term goals include higher school enrollment and less childhood hunger.

India's national nutrition mission was launched on March 8, 2018 under the Ministry of Women and Child Development, with special emphasis on the first 1,000 days of a child's life. It gathers more than 26 ministries and departments and set a target of cutting stunting among children aged 0 to 6 from 38.4 percent to 25 percent by 2022.