Tackling food insecurity: Effects on school-age children’s nutrition and academic performance

School-age children should have three meals, plus snacks between meals, every day, according to the Food and agriculture organization of the United Nations. Breakfast is important particularly if a child has to walk a long way to school and does not eat much at midday. Fao recommends that children must be given a snack in the mid-morning to keep their energy up for play and study.

Meals in the middle of the day should be as nutrient-rich as possible. Parents are urged to give children food to take to school like bread, sweet potato, plus an egg and fruit. The evening meal should also be healthy and could consist of fiber-rich foods, such as rice, small amounts of meat and fish, and plenty of fruits.

In a country like the Philippines, however, having three meals a day and snacks in between is more of an aspiration than a reality for many school children. A study released by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in December 2023 would attest to this. While it was not the focus of its evaluation, results of its 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) also revealed that more than a third of students in the Philippines reported not eating at least once a week due to lack of money.

OECD said a new question about food insecurity was included in the student questionnaire in PISA 2022. Results showed that in all Pisa-participating countries there are 15-year-old students who suffer from food insecurity or those who had to skip one or more meals a week in the month prior to PISA because they did not have enough money to buy food. Data indicated that the proportion of food-insecure students in some rich countries like the United Kingdom and the United States was in double digits.

The OECD study noted that all countries where at least a quarter of students reported not eating at least once a week due to lack of money are among the lowest-performing countries or economies in mathematics in PISA 2022 (i.e. average performance below 400 score points). The Philippines is one of the countries that recorded an average performance of below 400 points in mathematics. The country’s PISA 2022 score in mathematics was 355, lower than Thailand’s 394.

Access to healthy food is just one of the factors behind the PISA performance of Filipino children, but it is something that can be addressed. For instance, the government has already doubled the budget for the Department of Education’s feeding program to P11.27 billion for School Year 2024-2025. This translates to P25 per meal and the program’s expansion to a total of 220 feeding days.

The government must now turn its focus to areas outside of the school. The state’s intervention will mean nothing if children continue to experience hunger in their own homes. Serious attention must be accorded to increasing the productivity of food production areas and expanding access of all Filipinos to nutritious and affordable food items to enable the next-generation of learners to compete in the international arena.