The role of electric cooking in providing sustainable school meals in low-income and lower-middle-income countries

Abstract

Approximately 418 million children are beneficiaries of school meal programmes globally. In general, supportive infrastructure is necessary for the successful delivery of school meals, but in many low-income and lower-middle-income countries (LLMICs), schools have poor access to essential facilities such as kitchens, electricity, and clean water. Moreover, schools in LLMICs often rely on charcoal or firewood for cooking with consequent negative health, social, economic, and environmental impacts that disproportionally affect women and children. The increasing availability of electricity and large energy efficient cooking appliances in LLMICs suggests that electric cooking could offer a potential solution. However, although the impacts of providing electricity to schools on educational outcomes have been explored, and the scope for electric cooking transitions at household level is increasingly studied, evidence on the role of electricity in providing sustainable school meals remains scarce, particularly in LLMICs. Most existing studies on school meals focus on the health and nutritional values of school meals and do not consider the energy used in their preparation or associated impacts. To address this gap, this Personal View explores the contribution of electric cooking to providing sustainable school meals. Recent case studies from Kenya, Lesotho, Nepal, and Guinea that introduced electric cooking as an alternative to traditional cooking fuels have shown how electric cooking can contribute to providing sustainable schools meals in LLMICs. This Personal View highlights multiple sustainable benefits from shifting to electric cooking, which include environmental, economic, and health benefits, and time saving, with potential gender benefits intersecting these domains. Sharing lessons learned from each study could improve the delivery and effectiveness of these interventions for other schools, and understanding the range of contexts and challenges could help towards programme design for wider scaling of sustainable school meal provision.