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Mozambique School Lunch Initiative
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Our programs

School Feeding

A nutritious lunch, cooked at the school and served hot to every child.

Under MSLI's school feeding program, every child eats a free, freshly cooked lunch, prepared on site by local cooks. It is the foundation on which our other programs are built: preschool, Avança+ (school buses and mentorship), and health services all reach students through the school meal.

A long row of laughing children sit on the step of a yellow school building, eating xima from bright plastic plates
Lunchtime on the school step.
The numbers
30,000+
primary students fed every school day.
2026
254
schools in 6 districts of Gaza Province.
2026
6 million+
meals served to date.
2016–2026
97%
attendance, up from 60–70% before MSLI began providing school lunches.
2026

Since the first lunch in May 2016, we have never stopped serving at any school where we started.

Serving nutritious food, at school, so children can learn.

  1. Nutritious food.

    Cooked fresh on site by local cooks and served hot.

  2. At school.

    Free for every child who comes to school, every school day.

  3. So children can learn.

    A full stomach brings children to class and helps them to learn and stay focused.

A cook in a navy apron and gingham cap pours bean sauce from an enamel mug onto the plate of xima a boy with a red backpack holds out
A cook serving lunch.
Two boys in school uniform eat xima and beans from plates at a classroom desk
Children enjoying a hot lunch at school.
A grinning boy in a red T-shirt looks up from his exercise book and textbook at a wooden desk, classmates writing behind him
Students studying in a classroom.
How the model works

Built for rural Mozambique, built to scale.

A decentralized, community-based model.

Every school runs its own kitchen, staffed and supplied by the community around it.

  1. A kitchen on site: run by local cooks we train.

  2. Local food: sourced directly from Mozambican farmers whenever possible.

  3. Biweekly visits: our staff monitor quality and consistency at every school we serve.

  4. Quantified results: we track attendance, enrollment and growth over time.

Same model, any size school

A smiling cook in a gingham cap stirs a pot of xima over a wood fire at a small school30students

Two cooks in blue aprons and headwraps laugh beside two large pots of food1,300students

Our model scales to serve each school, whether it has 30 students or 1,300.

What's in a meal

Local food children already know and love.

The menu is adapted region by region, cooked fresh on site and served hot. A couple of examples:

Menu example

A smiling boy at a wooden desk beside a purple plate of xima and bean stew, against a wall of mud and sticks
Xima and beans.
A large pot of peanut and kale stew, stirred with a wooden paddle
Peanut kale stew and rice.

From the school garden to the school plate.

Where conditions allow, we support the creation of school gardens. Vegetables are planted, harvested and included in the lunch menu right at the school.

A woman bends to tend a row of young cabbages in a red-earth school garden
Vegetables are planted.
Two pupils and a man in a white coat holding up bunches of beetroot pulled from a school garden
Produce is harvested.
A child's hands holding a pink plate of xima, grated beetroot and bean stew
An addition to the plate.

“When we talk to the students and ask them what they eat at home, it's usually xima with pumpkin leaves. The family prepares one pot in the evening, and that's what they have for dinner.”

— Talvina Ualane, Chókwè District School Feeding Program Manager
Bought local

Every bag of beans starts with a Mozambican farmer.

We actively support local farmer cooperatives to grow the crops that are used in the school meals.

Take beans, an important staple of our school meals menu. By partnering with us, local farmers gain a steady, reliable buyer, and the money spent on a child's lunch stays in the community.

Two women bent over pulling bean plants in a green field under a clear blue sky, one with a baby tied on her back
Farmer group with their bean harvest.

  1. Local farmers grow beans.

    Farmer groups near our schools plant and harvest ingredients.

  2. We buy them.

    A steady buyer means a steady income for farmers.

  3. Beans are prepared for lunch.

    Local cooks at each school prepare a hot lunch.

  4. Children receive a nutritious meal.

    The whole community benefits from each lunch.

Beyond the plate · Health

The lunch brings children to school. The health team meets them there.

Because children come to school every day for lunch, they're there when government health workers arrive. We build on our school feeding network to help District Health Services bring free deworming and HPV vaccination to rural schools.

  1. A health worker in an orange vest handing cups to pupils at their desks in a classroom with pole-and-mud-brick walls
    Deworming, in the classroom.

    01 · Every enrolled pupil

    Deworming

    Where families drink from rivers and ponds, worm infections are common in children. District health workers treat them right in the classroom.

  2. Five girls holding up vaccination cards beside two health workers under a tree, with a cool box on the sand in front of them
    Girls with their HPV vaccination cards.

    02 · Girls aged 9 and over

    HPV vaccination

    Cervical cancer screening and treatment are major challenges in Mozambique, so girls are vaccinated at a young age, at school.

  3. 03 · Our part

    Getting the health team there.

    School meals bring students to class every day, which makes school the best place to reach them to provide health care. The Health District has the technicians and supplies, and we collaborate to ensure there is transport to even the most remote schools. Deworming ensures children are able to absorb the nutrients in their meals, so every meal does more for their health and their learning.

    2017

    in partnership with District Health Services since October 2017

A school-based vaccine only reaches girls who are in school. By improving school attendance, the school lunch ensures that girls are in the room when the vaccine arrives.

Hortencia, a girl in a white top, stands with her arm around an older woman in front of a thatched house
Hortencia.
One family

One meal at home. One meal at school. That's how they get by.

Hortencia, 10, and her brother Raúl, 7, are orphans who live with their grandmother, Florinda, in the village of Chate. Since illness forced Florinda to stop farming in 2024, the family usually eats just once a day, in the evening.

Their lunch at Chate "B" Primary School fills the gap. Without it, Florinda says, she doesn't know how her grandchildren would survive.

Both children still go to school every day, eager to learn, even without proper uniforms.

Leta Ubisse in a teal MSLI polo shirt and a checked headscarf, smiling in the doorway of a stick-walled kitchen
Leta Ubisse at the school kitchen in Punguine.

“Before the school lunch program, children would leave home in the morning, but they wouldn't make it to school. They'd go into the bush instead to look for wild fruits to eat. Now the children always come to school because of the food. I always make sure to get to the school by 6am to start cooking because I know the children are counting on me. I've become famous in my village, and I am known by all the children as Grandmother Leta.”

— Leta Ubisse, cook, Punguine Primary School
It doesn't stop

Drought, a pandemic, floods. The meals kept coming.

We began in the 2016 drought. When COVID closed schools in 2020, lunches became monthly food baskets within weeks.

In January 2026, floods delayed the school year by four weeks. We sent take-home rations, then served lunch on the first day back.

US$0.25

average cost per meal.

2026

There's no cost to a family, ever.

Nearly all of the children we serve live in poverty. For many, this is the most reliable meal of their day.

Give
A smiling boy holding a red bowl of food and a smiling girl with a backpack holding a blue lunch tub stand side by side on red sand
Lunch at school.
A small boy in a grey hoodie sits on red sand with a green plate of rice and beans and a cup in front of him, looking up at the camera
Rice and beans.
Two smiling schoolgirls in blue uniforms sit against a brick wall eating lunch of xima and stew from a bowl and a plate
Lunch together.
A cook in a gingham cap pours porridge from a mug into a blue bowl while pupils in blue uniforms queue beside her
Served hot.
The evidence

Why a school meal keeps a child in school.

A 2021 longitudinal study in Mozambique found that school meals were most strongly linked to fewer dropouts. School meals influenced dropouts more than distance to school, textbooks, reading proficiency or school director attendance ().

The UNESCO 2026 GEM Report on Mozambique shows that schools that introduced on-site meals improved enrollment and attendance, reaching up to 92% in 2024 ().

See the evidenceSee our results

US$50 feeds a child for a full school year.

The simplest, most direct way to keep a child in school.

Give

Pontuschka, R. (2025). Exploring the reasons behind primary school dropout in Mozambique: Longitudinal assessment of school dropout in Mozambique 2021. Policy brief. UNICEF Innocenti – Global Office of Research and Foresight.

Read the originalSee all citations

UNESCO (2026). Global Education Monitoring Report 2026, country case study: Mozambique.

Read the originalSee all citations