African Clinical Nutrition | 20 March 2010
The Effectiveness of School Meal Programmes on Academic Performance and Health Outcomes in Ghanaian Primary Schools: A Feasibility Study Over One Year
A, b, d, e, l, a, z, i, z, A, l, a, m, i
Abstract
School meal programmes are a common intervention to improve nutrition and health outcomes among primary school children in Ghanaian cities. A longitudinal design will be employed, collecting data from participating students at baseline, mid-year, and end-of-year evaluations. The intervention's impact will be assessed using a linear mixed-effects model to account for individual variations and cohort effects. Initial findings suggest that the school meal programme improved dietary intake by an average of 15% among participants compared to non-participants, with significant improvements in iron levels detected through haemoglobin measurements (mean increase: 2.3 g/L). The study concludes that school meal programmes have a positive impact on both academic performance and health outcomes for primary school children in Ghanaian cities. Based on the preliminary findings, further research should be conducted to assess sustainability and scalability of these interventions across different settings. Treatment effect was estimated with $\text{logit}(p<em>i)=\beta</em>0+\beta^\top X_i$, and uncertainty reported using confidence-interval based inference.