Guest article by the minister in the magazine Fortune. “How to fight child hunger in a time of foreign aid cuts”
Worldwide, school meals have become a central tool in the fight against hunger. National programmes are already reaching hundreds of millions of children and receiving broad political support because they demonstrably improve nutrition, education and health and also strengthen local economic cycles. As a consequence, global funding for school meals doubled from 2020 to 2024.
In their commentary, Reem Alabali Radovan, Dr Rajiv J. Shah and Prof. Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen outline why this progress is causing new challenges for many countries in the Global South – and how the newly launched School Meals Accelerator is helping to tackle them. The School Meals Accelerator was launched in Berlin on 16 January 2026 by the BMZ, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation and the World Food Programme.