School feeding programmes are normally funded in a variety of ways. For example, Brazil, Chile, India, Nigeria and South Africa implement self funded school feeding programmes. In other countries the funding for school feeding programmes come in packages where there is a combination of international and national funding and the donor funded element may be in the form of cash or in kind of donations. It has been noted that food for the programme has either been donated by developed countries, or purchased from big traders in the region with money from donors.

The system of providing donated foods to school children in remote areas is not without limitations; such as serving school meals that are palatable to these children not to mention the huge logistical challenges of getting these donated school meals to the poor children. Unlike the regular school feeding programmes, the Home Grown School Feeding (HGSF) programmes are expensive social programmes because of their added dimension of agriculture productivity and support for small scale farmers to access markets. But since HGSF has a wider set of stakeholders than school feeding programmes it should have a matching wider set of contributors. The estimated cost of running a school feeding programme including community contributions has been estimated to be $28 per child per year.

Initially, when a programmes starts in a low income country, it exhibits large variation on cost with concomitant opportunities for cost containment during the transition process. In the second stage, programmes become relatively more affordable with economic growth. This therefore argues for more focused support to help low-income countries move through the transition. Last but not least, the main pre-conditions for the transition to sustainable national programmes are mainstreaming school feeding into national policies and plans (especially education sector and sustainable agriculture development plans), alongside national financing and national implementation capacity.