According to the WFP, Africa is currently feeding 20 million more children with school meals.

Governments in sub-Saharan Africa have provided school meals to roughly 20 million extra children over the past two years, the World Food Programme (WFP) said this week, which it believes shows a move away from dependence on foreign aid and a stronger commitment to localised education.

The sub-Saharan region saw the biggest rise in school feeding of any region, up by almost a third overall, to 87 million in 2024. Rwanda, Ethiopia, and even severely impoverished Chad and Madagascar, all managed to feed six times as many over the period.

The WFP’s report stated that: “Government investments in school meals … [signal] a significant shift from reliance on foreign aid to recognising school meals as a strategic public investment in children’s education [and] health.”

The WFP understandably sees this as a welcome improvement on a continent plagued by rising numbers of hungry people as a result of extreme weather linked to climate change, armed conflict and food inflation. Yet it failed to cite spiralling population growth on the African continent as a primary aggravating factor, without which the demand for food would be significantly reduced.

A United Nations (UN) report at the end of July 2025 found that more than one in five Africans, 307 million people, were chronically malnourished, meaning hunger is worse than it was two decades ago. It predicted that by 2030, the continent would contain 60% of the world’s hungry people.

Poor countries currently face falling aid from their rich counterparts. United States President Donald Trump’s administration has slashed its aid arm and many European nations have also cut assistance in order to re-allocate spending on defence in the wake of Russia’s re-emergence as a threat.

The WFP report also found that local farmers had benefited from the school feeding. The buying of local food by the Benin government for these programmes is estimated to have contributed over $23 million to the economy in 2024. And more than a third of school meals in Sierra Leone came from food produced by smallholder farmers.

However, the World Food Programme warned that millions of children, especially in some of the lowest-income African countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Somalia, and South Sudan, still lacked access to school meals, as donor support continued to fall.

With the population of Africa having increased by a staggering 88 per cent in the first quarter of this century alone, it appears that the WFP has missed an important opportunity to address the main cause of African hunger. And as the continent’s population swells further, the demand for food will almost certainly continue to outpace supply.

At the time of writing, the population of Africa sits at approximately 1.557 billion, an 88 per cent increase since 2000. The fertility rate (average number of births per mother) is currently at 3.95.

Submitted by Friends of Retha


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