Feeding the future workforce: How evidence is shaping Jordan’s school feeding and jobs agenda

Across developing economies, the jobs challenge operates on two fronts: expanding employment opportunities today and building a healthier and more skilled workforce for the future. Investments in education and nutrition are central to both, shaping children’s long-term productivity while also creating immediate economic opportunities, particularly for women.

School feeding programs sit at the intersection of these priorities. Now implemented in more than 100 countries, they are known to improve school attendance and learning.  But their full potential extends further. When designed intentionally, they can strengthen children’s human capital development while also generating jobs through local food systems and service delivery.

 Designing school feeding to deliver nutrition and jobs

Jordan’s National School Feeding Program illustrates how these two pathways can be addressed in parallel. The program has relied on a simple and scalable model where children receive two date bars per day, a shelf-stable snack that is easy to produce in bulk and distribute nationwide. The bars provide energy and meet operational needs, though their nutritional profile is relatively modest.

To enhance dietary diversity while creating economic opportunities for women, Jordan introduced a new “healthy meals” modality alongside the existing program. Beginning in 2022, the World Food Programme (WFP), together with the Ministry of Education and the Royal Health Awareness Society, rolled out the approach progressively, while most schools continued to receive date bars. In participating schools, students receive fresh snacks four days per week, with date bars one day per week. The new meals are calorie-equivalent to the bars but lower in sugars and higher in protein. They are sourced from local producers and bakeries and assembled and packaged in community kitchens operated and staffed by local women, linking improved nutrition with local employment creation.

This shift also created an opportunity to rigorously assess impacts. The World Bank Group’s Development Economics Vice Presidency Group and WFP’s Office of Evaluation conducted a randomized trial across 473 schools to examine how healthy meals affected children’s nutrition, attendance, learning, and women’s employment outcomes.

What the evidence showed

The evaluation examined impacts along two distinct pathways: outcomes for children, and employment effects for women.

Children receiving healthy meals had more diverse diets, spent 8 percent less on sugary or fatty snacks at school, were more physically active, and attended school one additional day per year. The healthier meals were also more popular with students, supporting strong uptake of the new menu. Impacts on physical activity were particularly pronounced among boys, a group at higher risk of obesity and lower educational outcomes in later grades. Together, these findings show how healthier school meals can shape eating and activity patterns early, offering a practical response to rising childhood obesity and sedentary behaviors (World Bank Working Paper). These gains contribute to building a healthier and more productive future workforce.

Note: This infographic was generated by the authors using ChatGPT.

Women employed in community kitchens also benefited. The program increased income, confidence to engage in paid work, and overall life satisfaction, while shifting household attitudes toward women’s earnings, according to a WFP report. These gains are particularly meaningful in a context where female labor force participation is one of the lowest at 14%, according to World Bank data, and align with global evidence on the broader benefits of women’s economic participation. These results point to meaningful gains in women’s labor force participation and local job creation..

Learning, adapting, scaling

The strength of the evidence directly informed national scale-up decisions. Drawing on evaluation findings, the World Bank Education team in Jordan worked with the Ministry of Education and local partners to expand the school feeding model into refugee settings where needs are most acute. Additional financing through the Forced Displacement Trust Fund, funded by the Government of the Netherlands, is supporting the delivery of daily nutritious meals to more than 74,000 students under the Modernizing Education Skills and Administrative Reforms (MASAR) project.

The scale-up targets both immediate needs and longer-term development challenges facing refugee children. Launched at the start of the 2025–2026 academic year, the expansion focuses on camps and vulnerable communities, including Mafraq and Irbid governorates and the Azraq and Za’atari refugee camps, where children face a double burden of undernutrition and obesity due to limited access to diverse foods.

The expanded model continues to generate multiple benefits across sectors. This dual-impact model positions school feeding as both a human capital investment and a jobs-supporting intervention, addressing immediate employment needs while strengthening the future workforce. Community kitchens provide stable jobs, income, and skills development for women, while balanced school meals support children’s energy levels and improve attendance. Scaling required adaptations to supply chains, menus, and logistics, but the core design and its documented impacts remained intact.

This experience illustrates how evidence can be embedded into operational decision-making. Through the World Bank Group’s LEADS (Learn. Adapt. Scale.) approach created by the Development Impact Group, research teams, operational staff, and government counterparts worked together to ensure that evaluation results informed program design, financing, and implementation in real time.

Looking ahead

As the program grows, sustainability has become a central policy concern. The evaluation clarifies not only which design features deliver results, but also what it costs to sustain them over time. In response, the additional financing includes technical assistance to support the Government of Jordan in developing a sustainable financing strategy, ensuring that effective school feeding can be maintained and expanded within realistic fiscal constraints.

Jordan’s experience shows how school feeding can deliver along two distinct but complementary dimensions: strengthening children’s health and learning as a foundation for future productivity, while creating immediate employment opportunities for women. By keeping these pathways explicit in both design and evaluation, the program demonstrates how investments in education and nutrition can contribute directly to a broader jobs agenda. For countries facing tight fiscal constraints, the lesson is practical: invest in interventions that simultaneously build human capital and expand economic opportunities.

The Impact Evaluation of the School Meal Programme in Jordan was conducted as part of a partnership between the World Bank and the World Food Programme. The entire impact evaluation team includes Jonas Heirman, Roshni Khincha, Lina Khraise, Florence Kondylis, Phuong La, Benedetta Lerva, Simone Lombardini, Hannah Uckat, and Kairat Umargaliyev.