School Connect’s scaling journey to 10,000 schools
This WFP innovation has scaled to 20 countries, 10,000 schools and 3.6 million students, helping school meal programmes improve their monitoring and reporting on school meal distribution.
By: Jackie Negro, Anaswara Kovithal and Isabelle Lacson
On school days in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, many students are grabbing their books and heading underground to gain their education. To protect students from the dangers of the war, the city has built a subterranean school system in bomb shelters to bring students back to school safely.
With the children in Zaporizhzhia already enduring war, ensuring they are safe — and fed — in school is a sliver of hope for a brighter future for the next generation of youth in Ukraine.
Especially in difficult circumstances, school meals play an important role in supporting the well-being and education of young people.
In Zaporizhzhia, where they are transitioning back to in-person schooling after two years of virtual classes, having a meaningful tool to track, record and make data-driven decisions on school meals is one way to make the transition back to school in a particularly stressful context smoother, easier and more supportive to students.
That’s where School Connect comes in.
A digital solution for school meals in Ukraine
In early 2025, WFP launched School Connect, its standard IT solution for monitoring and reporting school meal distribution, in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. With School Connect, WFP school meal officers and school staff can input data on critical school meals metrics, such as enrolment, attendance, food deliveries, stock movement and meals served on a digital platform.
Around the world, schools, especially in under-resourced areas, traditionally track school meal programmes by hand on paper. This manual process can be tedious, time-consuming and difficult to convert to reports for the public school meal programme. School Connect’s digital solution saves time in programme management and reporting, a critical element of collaborating with public school meal programmes as WFP strives to transition school meal programmes to national ownership.
“We now close monthly reporting in about three days. Schools enter data weekly, making it possible for the educational authority to finalize reporting quickly at the end of the month.”
-Anna Krasnoshchoka, WFP school meals officer in Zaporizhzha.
With faster and improved reporting, reconciliation can be done on time and all of the implementing parties can fulfill their obligations, ultimately ensuring a steady delivery of healthy meals to school children.
School Connect was selected to implement in this complex context due to its successful history, having reached 10,000 schools in 20 countries in just four years of implementation. The proven solution helps WFP go faster and further with its school meals data.
Why School Connect?
In 2024, WFP provided school meals to 21.3 million children globally, a significant portion of its overall assistance. For these large safety net and humanitarian operations, quality data enables WFP to plan accurately, deliver food on time and make evidence-based decisions.
Still, when data is collected manually on paper, it takes considerable time to consolidate data for reporting and there is large room for error. These challenges ultimately complicate effective school meal planning and delivery.
School Connect was developed by WFP staff, who are constantly innovating to tackle key development and humanitarian challenges, like effective and efficient school meal planning and reporting.
The solution has several key advantages for school meal programmes:
First and foremost, School Connect moves school-level data from paper to platform, collecting vital data such as enrolment, attendance, food deliveries, stock movement and meals served in a user-friendly app that is integrated with WFP’s corporate data platform, embedding innovation into WFP’s DNA.
Second, the platform accommodates various WFP delivery models from on-site feeding and cash-to-schools to home-grown school feeding, making it adaptable to different country and school contexts.
To facilitate implementation, the School Connect team pairs interested WFP country offices with a rollout manager for tailored assessment, onboarding and training. The team is also developing visual handbooks and simplified standard operating procedures for schools to aid the rollout and reduce implementation costs significantly.
Digital school meal data enables WFP school meal programmes to seamlessly report to national governments and supports the transition of school meal programmes to national ownership, a key goal of WFP to foster long-term sustainability, strengthen national systems and enable governments to address critical development challenges.
Finally, School Connect’s team continuously improves their tool, contributing significantly to its success and impact. This includes engaging the WFP Innovation Accelerator, which has supported School Connect through two sprint innovation programmes, one in 2021 and one ongoing in 2025. In this current period, the WFP Innovation Accelerator is helping refine School Connect’s offering and building an improved version of the app’s user interface.
School Connect’s journey to 10,000 schools
“Bringing 10,000 schools into the platform shows how WFP country offices, together with governments and other cooperating partners, are actively investing in digital transformation.”
-Peter Holtsberg, Global head of school meal programmes, WFP
At every step on the way to 10,000 schools, consultation, feedback loops, testing and user-centeredness have shaped School Connect’s evolution.
School Connect’s journey began in Burundi, where the platform was co-designed with teachers, administrators and WFP field staff following the principle of human-centred design. In just two years, it successfully established a presence in over 500 WFP schools across Burundi, demonstrating its rapid and effective ability to scale.
With its pilot operation and learnings under its belt, the School Connect team started expanding, rolling out the tool to new countries, taking into account their diverse contexts every step of the way.
When use cases and requests came in, they learned how to respond and implement quickly. For instance, in Benin, the School Connect team quickly developed a dashboard with real-time insights to respond to a request from the presidential coordination cell, tracking everything from attendance trends to the variety of foods that make up healthy and nutritious school meals.
In North-western Kenya, the School Connect team rolled out the product in Kakuma Refugee Camp, which is home to more than 150,000 refugees. In 2024, the Kenyan government began to provide additional support for the school meals programme, which changed requirements and expectations on schools. The team further customized School Connect to ensure it was still relevant and useful to the school meals programme in Kakuma and to enhance accountability for both government and WFP general food assistance.
In Ukraine, the team took their learnings from the past four years to roll out the tool amidst the stresses of the war, the unique context of the underground schools and the new timelines for school development. The solution took hold in Zaporizhzhia, and the team hopes to continue to scale in Ukraine throughout 2025.
Each of these implementations — from Benin, Kenya and Ukraine to Haiti, Mali or any of the 22 countries reached so far — has made School Connect smarter and stronger, enabling it to reach 10,000 schools and building brighter futures for school children and their communities.
Beyond 10,000 schools
As the team looks beyond its 10,000-school milestone, it retains its bold vision for School Connect’s future. It will continue to enhance its functionalities, expand its reach to more countries and schools and expand its analytic capabilities.
“We now have a wealth of data on school meals that we never had before. From that, we can not only enhance transparency and assurance but also make more data-driven decisions. We could also partner with organizations like the School Meals Coalition to conduct research to better understand the impact of school meals.”
-Matthew Dearborn, Team Lead for the Food Systems and Nutrition team overseeing the rollout of the digital solutions for school meals.
With the continued backing of the WFP Innovation Accelerator, its drive for scale and its proven track record of results, School Connect is poised to not only scale further but to help reshape the future of school meal programming.
School Connect’s journey from one school to 10,000 is not just a technological achievement. Every data point captured through School Connect represents a school and system better equipped to nourish and serve future generations.
Learn more about WFP’s school meals programming and School Connect.
Are you an innovator at WFP or a start-up that could be applied in humanitarian contexts? Learn more about the WFP Innovation Accelerator Innovation Challenge.
The WFP Innovation Accelerator sources, supports and scales high-potential solutions to end hunger worldwide. We provide WFP colleagues, entrepreneurs, start-ups, companies, and non-governmental organizations with access to funding, mentorship, hands-on support, and WFP’s global operations.
Find out more about us: http://innovation.wfp.org.
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