School Feeding Management App

In Guatemala, there are established food suppliers or monopolies that provide food to home grown school feeding programmes. Meanwhile, according to national law, Guatemalan schools must source at least half of their food supplies from smallholder farmers in their region.

Local smallholder farmers are at a disadvantage if they are unaware of or unable to access school feeding programmes to supply their produce. This is a missed opportunity for smallholder farmers who could otherwise have connected to these markets and improved their incomes and livelihoods.

WFP's School Feeding Management App (SFMA) links local farmers with school feeding programmes in Guatemala. Through this project, the WFP Country Office in Guatemala aims to strengthen the Home Grown School Feeding programme by improving the supply of locally produced, nutritious food.

SFMA improves smallholder farmers' livelihoods and supports the local economy by encouraging and training the farming community to participate in food supply procurement processes at schools. SFMA uses technology that integrates transparency, data permanency, and reliability to improve the performance of school feeding programmes and deliver higher-quality services to children and families. In addition, the food procurement process will become more efficient in thousands of schools using the SFMA digital tool.

Throughout the WFP Sprint Programme, the SFMA project team aims to pilot-test, iterate, and deploy the SFMA digital tool and validate whether smallholder farmers will be willing and able to use it to supply their produce to schools. The project aims to expand coverage of the application to all schools with homegrown school feeding programmes in Guatemala and develop a sustainability strategy with the Ministry of Education and Agriculture.

Currently, the pilot is being implemented in 210 schools, with an attendance of 64,978 students, and includes 130 local producers in 59 municipalities in six departments in Guatemala. 

The first and second rounds of user training have been concluded and the performance of the mobile application has been validated, which will be used in the first quarter of the 2023 school year after a third round of training.