A new school meal system: What has really changed?

At a ceremony in August to mark the opening of a new industrial zone for Silo Foods, a subsidiary of the military National Service Projects Organization, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced a new program to provide school meals for the current academic year, which would be prepared by the new factory. “We are keen on providing our children with good, reliable school meals in a secure manner,” Sisi said. 

The new program will cost nearly LE8 billion, paid for through cuts to the budgets of several ministries and government agencies. Sisi also specifically highlighted using the increased revenues derived from his announced plan to raise the price of subsidized bread for the first time in three decades to help fund the school meal program.

The implementation of the program began in November and will continue expanding through to its final phase in mid-December. For the past few weeks, students have been receiving the newly packaged school meals, many of which are emblazoned with propaganda hailing state projects like the new administrative capital.

Yet just weeks into the new program, hundreds of students were transferred to hospitals in Qena and Assiut after consuming government-provided school meals, with other suspected food poisoning cases reported in Kafr al-Sheikh. The cases prompted the governors of Qena and Assiut to suspend the distribution of school meals, as authorities investigate the incident and samples are examined.

Although Education Minister Tarek Shawky denied the existence of any cases of poisoning among students and asserted that school meals were of “the highest quality,” the incident raises legitimate questions about whether the new school meals program does indeed address the problems of the old system or not. 

Tracing some of the history of school meals in Egypt through to the new program, offers some insight into the current shape the system has taken — from its approach to questions of nutrition, to its method of awarding contracts, to an increased centralization of the supply chain.

School meal programs are nothing new in Egypt. The first such program was introduced after a 1942 law that required the state to cover meal expenses for children in primary education, with the Education Ministry being tasked with providing meals to schools across the country. During this period, King Farouk decreed that school meals be offered in a bid to support families and incentivize children to go to school. Each meal consisted of a loaf of bread, a block of tahini-based halawa, a bowl of fava beans, a slice of white cheese and some peanuts.

In the years under Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rule following the 1952 revolution, the same meal continued to be offered, supplemented with fruit. The makeup of the school meal underwent various changes under successive governments over the decades. Most recently,  it consisted of an 80-gram pack of biscuits or a date-stuffed cookie. 

In principle, school meal programs can play a significant role in combating child malnutrition. According to Tamer Samir, the general coordinator for the Presidential Initiative to Eliminate Malnutrition-Related Diseases (obesity, stunting and anemia), the earlier success of the 100 Million Health Lives initiative to detect hepatitis C inspired the government to launch a similar campaign to identify malnutrition-related illnesses in schoolchildren. 

Over the past three years, at least 25 million students have been examined across both public and private schools. Those found to be suffering health complications related to nutrition were referred to public clinics for treatment. “President Sisi then instructed us that treatment alone was insufficient,” Samir says.

The testing campaign found that 3.4 million students in primary education (approximately 13.5 percent of those tested) suffer from obesity, according to comments by the education minister at the Silo Foods inauguration. Another 1.3 million (approximately 5 percent) were deemed to be stunted, while 8.2 million (approximately 33 percent), were classified as anemic.

The campaign to study nutrition-related health problems prompted the government to begin looking past treatment to prevention, and school meals became a primary focus, according to Samir, who says that breakfast accounts for 25 to 30 percent of a child’s nutritional needs.

A treatment map was drawn based on all nutrition studies in elementary schools, from grades one through six, Samir says. This map would guide the school meal system, with the National Nutrition Institute developing meal specifications for the Silo Foods plant that was built to produce the meals.

The school meals are designed based on age group, daily nutritional needs and test results, and are catered specifically to different governorates. At the Silo Foods plant inauguration, Health Minister Hala Zayed outlined a number of examples. Students in governorates with an anemia rate of more than 50 percent receive meals that include cooked dishes with animal-based iron sources, as well as cheese, fresh and dried fruit, while meals in governorates with an anemia rate above 20 percent vary between fresh and dried fruit.

Governorates with an obesity rate of more than 20 percent are to receive meals that include  sesame-covered breadsticks, white cheese, fruit, biscuits and milk; while governorates with a lower obesity rate of more than 10 percent receive meals that include hummus, peanuts, fava beans, sesame cakes, wafer biscuits and sesame-covered crackers. Meals also vary during the week, so “children don’t get bored” with the food, according to Shawky.

However, based on meal samples from different governorates that Mada Masr reviewed, the meals did not appear to differ much from region to region and lacked many of the components that were announced in the rollout of the new plan. In Kafr al-Sheikh, meals included a juice box and wafer biscuits. The same meal was provided to primary school students in Qena, albeit in different packaging. There was a difference in the kindergarten meals in Qena however, which consisted of biscuits and two cartons of milk, according to educational sources from a school in Qena.

In Matrouh, the kindergarten meal consisted of biscuits and two cartons of milk, according to an official source in one of the educational administrations in the governorate, while the primary school meal consisted of two juice boxes and a date-stuffed cookie three days a week, and plain biscuits and a date-stuffed cookie the remaining two days of the school week.

Under the new program, the distribution of school meals is supposed to be controlled through smart cards issued to each student. According to the health minister, the plan is to activate the card using a QR code which is linked to the results of the child nutrition research. According to Shawky, this process should be overseen by the Education Ministry and the secured and smart documents complex in the new capital — where all data on student nutrition is stored — to ensure that meals are distributed according to the plan.

However, according to an official government source close to the school meal program who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity, the smart card plan developed with the Health Ministry was suspended in its final stages — which involved issuing a card for each child with their personal health data — just days before the health minister went on vacation.

The new school meal program for the current academic year costs LE7.7 billion, according to Sisi — more than six times the previous year’s budget of LE1.2 billion — with the additional costs to be funded by “cutting ministries’ budgets,” according to Sisi.

The price tag of the new program puts the average cost of school meals at approximately LE644 (around US$41) per student per academic year. The program aims to cover approximately 13.2 million preschoolers and elementary school children. According to the education minister, 95 percent of the program’s budget comes out of the general budget, with the other 5 percent from other sources. 

Abdel Hafeez Tayel, the director of the Egyptian Center for the Right to Education, criticizes the government's decision to make cuts to ministry budgets in order to cover the cost of the program. Tayel notes that the Constitution mandates that the government spend 6 percent of gross national income on education, but its spending has been less than 2.3 percent. He says the allocation for education should be increased, but not by deducting funds from other ministries.

The marked increase in the anticipated budget for school meals is not the only notable change to the program — funding and supply chains have also been significantly modified. “This time around, nobody is going to handle cash,” says Samir, the head of the anti-malnutrition initiative. “It used to be that financial allotments were set aside for the Education Ministry, which contracted suppliers itself. That process wasn’t very well monitored.”

The old supply and distribution process was decentralized, according to statements by the school nutrition official at the Education Ministry in 2017. Financial provisions were transferred by the Finance Ministry directly to local districts, where governors took charge and held a public tender for their individual governorates based on the number of students and types of meals recommended by their local education directorates.

A list of bidders would be submitted to the Education Ministry, which would then refer them to the ministries of health, industry, and supply, for vetting. When a contract was awarded, each governorate informed the Health Ministry who would then observe the food preparation process of the selected supplier, beginning with the supply of ingredients through to the final product. Education directorates would then take the meals to an inspection and intake committee at each school, chaired by the school principal and including several teachers and a visiting official  from the local health directorate.

Despite this multi-step process, contaminated school meals have been delivered to students, causing major health crises in the past. For example, in late 2016 and early 2017, nearly 5,000 students received medical attention for food poisoning, forcing the education minister to temporarily suspend the school meal program.

After a full-year hiatus, the Education Ministry reintroduced school meals with a number of changes to the oversight process. The ministry was tasked with overseeing the tender process for suppliers as opposed to the local education directorates in order to standardize supply contracts across the country. The new process also banned stockpiling meals and brought in several government bodies, including the National Food Safety Authority, to inspect factories.

However, the modified system appeared to repeat past mistakes. Just two weeks after the reinstatement of the new school meal program, a number of students in several governorates were suspected of having food poisoning. A source at the food safety authority denied that any such cases existed, dismissing the whole event as the students exhibiting a “contagion of hysteria.”

Under the new system for the current academic year, the government claims this will all change. “[Oversight] will be a daily thing and it will be tightly controlled, from inception until it reaches our children,” Sisi said.

In mid-September, the Cabinet approved the Education Ministry’s contract with Silo Foods to supply meals for the school program. Meanwhile, the Cabinet agreed in October to a request from Al-Azhar to also contract with Silo Foods to supply meals for students within its school system. However, it appears Silo Foods is not the only corporation involved in the new system. The new meals include products from other food companies, including Domty, Greenland, and Prego Food Industries. In fact, wafer biscuits were the only Silo Foods product in the various school meals that Mada Masr reviewed.

As the latest news of students in Qena and Assiut suffering from food poisoning made headlines in late November, the food safety authority suspended the participation of three companies in the school meal system — Al-Rashidi al-Mizan Sweets, Prego Food Industries, and Al-Qubaisi Juices — while Al-Azhar did the same.

Educational sources in Qena and Marsa Matrouh told Mada Masr that a number of components of the new school meal system were supplied by contractors involved in the old school meal program. The official government source close to the school meal program said that the transfer to the new program is still underway and the current situation is a "temporary" one as the new plan becomes fully established.

Mada Masr tried to contact Deputy Education Minister Reda Hegazy and the head of the Ministry’s public education sector, Randa Shahin, for more details on the new school program and what changes have been implemented, but received no response.

Meanwhile, the head of the food safety authority, Hussein Mansour, told Mada Masr in late November that the priority with regard to the school meal program is to ensure that all factories supplying meal components adhere to food safety rules and regulations, and that they are approved on the white list after inspection. Representatives of the food safety authority do snap inspections of factories to determine whether they are up to the required standards.

What is clear is that the features of the new school meal program so far appear to differ significantly from what was originally announced. The question remains whether the new system will correct past mistakes by preparing and distributing school meals with a higher degree of efficiency and oversight to the millions of students who rely on them.