This guide is aimed at all stakeholders responsible for developing school feeding menus and is designed to provide guidance on menu planning for national school feeding programmes in both low- and middle-income countries. The guide’s focus is on children aged 6-12 years but can easily be adapted to include adolescents and other age groups.

This guidance deals with a set of steps to be considered while planning menus for HGSF programmes that are currently being used, or considered for use in many African and Asian countries.

The Operational Guidance on Menu Planning contains two main phases with various steps covering the key components of planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating school feeding programmes which aim to reduce micronutrient deficiencies and malnutrition and enhance learning among school children. These stages should ideally be conducted in chronological order, although some stages are inter-related and may overlap.