00:00 Jane Goodland: Hello and welcome to the LSEG sustainable growth podcast where we talk to leading experts about sustainability and finance and everything in between. I'm Jane Goodland, and this week we have something a little bit different for you, because we're talking to Donald Bundy, who's the professor of epidemiology and development at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which is one of the world's leading public health universities. He's also the director of the Global Research consortium for school health and nutrition.
Now cast your mind back to your childhood, and I'm sure you'll remember school dinners with varying degrees of fondness. I must say, I've never been a fan of rice pudding ever since my first encounters with it in the dinner hall in my primary school. Anyway, today's episode, we explore why we should actually rethink the humble school dinner. And Don will argue that, in fact, that they could be a fundamental and compelling driver for sustainable economic growth around the world.
But before we hear from Don, a quick reminder to follow us and rate us on Spotify, apple, podcasts, or any other platform, you use. Right, enjoy the show. Let's hear from Don.
Well, a very warm welcome to you, Don. Thanks so much for joining us today. It does actually feel like quite some time ago that you and I first talked about doing this episode. So I'm really looking forward to getting into the conversation eventually today. So just to be clear who you are and what you do. You're a professor at the London School of hygiene and tropical medicine. But you wear a lot of other hats. I was just looking at your LinkedIn page today, and frankly just watching it and reading it made me tired. So tell me about your career, because I believe it started actually in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies. Is that right?
01:49 Donald Bundy: Yeah, that's absolutely right, Jane, and it's a pleasure for me to be able to talk about these issues with you. Yeah, I started a long time ago in the University of the West Indies, in Kingston, Jamaica. That was my very first professional job. and it was the beginning of a 20 plus year academic career. So I spent 6 to 7 years there and then. That's the time Bob Marley was still alive. It was the time of fire over Babylon, the cricket the cricket debacles, and so forth. It was politically very interesting. It's actually been very powerful for me in my in my career since then, in creating my own character and helping me develop because a lot of the things we talk about now around decolonizing courses and so forth as academics. Well, that was the time when they were decolonizing the University. The University used to be an external college of London University, so really big, growing it into the great Independent university. That it is now is, you know, was part of that. So yeah. So I started there then I and that's really what cemented my early interest in the development of children, particularly school children and adolescents. A lot of people had worked on early child development. Still, today it's the majority focus. But I rapidly realized how important those years were for children after those vital early years when they started to go to school, and as they grew up, and that whole, we talk about the whole 7,000 days after the 1,000 days when children are becoming adults when they go through puberty, and they end up as adults, and they end up as educated and healthy adults. If we do things right. So that became my area of interest. When I left Jamaica it was back to the Uk. To Imperial College again. For about 7 years I have a rather Biblical trend to my to my career progression, and then focusing lots of support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Welcome trust on working with countries to create programs to support school children in terms of their health and development, and then from Imperial to Oxford University and that kind of was the end of that phase of my academic development, because in around the nineties the World Bank introduced the idea of human capital. The idea that they should invest in people in the same way they'd historically invested in infrastructure. And I was one of a then relatively small group that worked on the issue of what does it take to develop a person? What is it you need to invest in? And I went over for a 2 year fellowship with the World Bank, which became a 15 year Stay.
04:35 Donald Bundy: Again. So, the first 7 years were with the policy unit there on, you know. What do you do? What is it that countries might do to ensure that children grow up and become successful and prosperous adults. And then the second part was working very specifically with Africa, although I worked in other regions, too, on rolling those things out. And over those 15 years I worked with 75 governments on actual programs. So, this was a sort of doing phase of my career. And then from there I joined the Gates Foundation. I was an advisor in the global health team, senior advisor in the global health team for a few years before I came back to Britain, which is where I'm from and where I am now.
05:17 Jane Goodland: And so let's move on to what you're doing currently. So you're at the London School of Hygiene and tropical medicine. But you're also involved with the school meals coalition and the global research consortium. So I'm kind of interested to explore, how have you ended up doing that? And what is it.
05:37 Donald Bundy: Right, Good question. So a little context here. I talked about the importance of those early years, the schooling years for development of children. Back in 2008, the fuel, food and financial crisis of 2008, terrible crisis worldwide struck first in the low-income countries with food prices going out of control and countries were being offered by development agencies, financing, and they chose to use it to support school meals programs. They chose to use the money to invest in their school children. And this was actually quite a surprise for most development people in those days. But we began to realize why that was that this wasn't just about making sure children aren't hungry at school. This was about actually supporting this development of human capital, it was guaranteeing the country's future. This was investing in their next generation. and it became clear as the as that crisis turned into a worldwide recession that this wasn't just a problem for low income countries. This was a problem too. Well, we saw that the school meals programs became something that from, you know, from Scotland to Spain, were being used by what I would describe as the rich countries, the high income countries to support their children in the same way. I'm going to come back to talking about Covid a bit later, but you know what we saw with Marcus Rashford coming forward and talking about schools being open during the summer vacation, and so forth, and supporting all the children who were in school. That sort of thinking actually started back then in 2010, as a way of responding to the recession. So what we saw after that. So we saw the 2 examples that was most closely associated with that time was Russia and China. Both launched major school meals programs. And following this this idea that you were investing in children the idea that this was a program that was a social protection program as much as it was a nutrition program and over the next decade, up till 2020 we saw this huge growth worldwide, and school meals became the world's most extensive social safety net. It became the case that most countries had a school meals program something like 50% approaching. 50% of primary school children worldwide, were receiving free school meals paid for by the countries themselves. It was a huge change.
08:16: And then and then I'm saying 2020, because you'll realize that's when Covid arrived right? So
420 million children being fed every day in school. what do we decide to do, we decide to close all the schools worldwide the first time that had ever been attempted, and it was miserably successful. Very few countries didn't close their schools most countries did, and that had terrible consequences. So this was taking away the safety net that had been carefully built over the last 10 years. And what did we see happening? Well, first, set of course, education stopped but then we discovered that schools were also the way that most systems chose to reach school-age children and adolescents and all of those support structures were just taken away, and children no longer have the security of schools. So we saw a rise in child marriages. We saw girls getting married much earlier. They were no longer schoolgirls. They were now out in the community that we saw a rise in child, in young pregnancy, in, in, in too early pregnancy, we saw, with boys in particular, inappropriate labour becoming a big factor. There were really poor consequences for this socially, and some of the schools didn't open for years. Some countries closed their schools for 2, or in some cases 3 years, during the during the covid pandemic, with terrible consequences for their children. And what happened then is very important that the parents of these children said, What's going on here? We need to fix this. The government's listening to their voters said, Yeah, we need to do that. And the governments got together. They created a coalition. They called it the School Meals Coalition, but they actually meant supporting children of school age coalition. That's really what it was about. And so they created this group back in October 21 was when it was set up. I think there were 40 countries that were part of it at that stage. Today there's 108 countries that are part of it. This has become one of the most institutionalized groups that grew out of the covid crisis.
10:36 Jane Goodland: What does the Coalition do then? What's the main kind of mission that it has.
10:41 Donald Bundy: Sure. So the purpose of the Coalition is to was then to reopen and rebuild the programs that they'd had before to get back to 2020, if you like, because everything is shut amazingly. They've already done that. The Coalition's already achieved that. And they brought in in fact, post covid. There have been 30 million more children, part of the school meals activity. But in order to make this coalition effective, they decided to have an initiative which they called the research consortium to provide the evidence, the guidance for what countries should do to build back these programs, but to build back more efficient programs. The overall goal is that every child should get a meal in school and also be supported in other health and sociological ways in in school by 2030. That's the overall goal. But the reality is that countries are doing it a country at a time, and they're driving it. They're driving it themselves.
11:41 Jane Goodland: And the consortium is an international like you said is 108 countries now involved, and I know that you like to get out and about and go and see things for yourself, and I believe you were recently in Ukraine, and maybe Africa as well. Can you help us understand. Just sort of bring this to life a little bit in terms of what's happening in these countries. And I guess what's different from before. Really.
12:07 Donald Bundy: Sure. And I want to emphasize that this is about countries doing this right. You know, so often, we talk about these kinds of programs. And we're talking about NGOs and charities and things like this. This is country led stuff. So it's a 48 billion dollars industry. If you like 98% spent, supported by the by domestic funds. So Ukraine? Well, you know this is an extraordinary one, isn't it? So? 18 months ago Ukraine got in touch with us, and with some other agencies, but particularly they asked us to help them design a program to address the issue of the schoolchildren who were in a time of war, that was what they called it. And so, a couple of months ago, I had the privilege of going to Kiev to actually launch to launch that program with the first lady of Ukraine, Alina Zelenska and that's a program that's specifically about supporting those children who manage to get to school. So one of the big problems in Ukraine, as you might imagine is, there's a lot of children are learning off just online because they actually can't go to schools or their schools have been destroyed. So they've been reopening schools. But providing food in those schools as an incentive for children to go to those schools but also because and this is the key point. They recognize that the future of Ukraine is these children, and that if they don't invest in these children now then, they won't have a future irrespective of the outcome of the war. So they're currently feeding about 1.2 million children a day in Ukraine with a particular focus on those kids who are in the frontline territories, children who, you know, sadly spend their entire day. Their school is actually inside a bomb shelter. Those children particularly are getting support. So that's a you know, there's a country in in actually a very productive country, with no food security problems and so forth. But of course, we work internationally on this, and we work with many of the countries. You're more used to hearing us working with worldwide. And we have a group of communities of practice. And I think this is a key point that what we do is we work with the governments in in these countries and with the experts in these countries to help accelerate the programs that are in place and to develop programs when they aren't in place. So that's the particular work of the research consortium.
14:34 Jane Goodland: It's fascinating. And I think that you know there's so much scope for different countries to learn from one another, and actually just starting to think through. You know, this is not just about, you know, having kids getting access to healthy, nutritious meals in in schools. But like, you say there's so much complexity now in terms of schools may not be operating as they were because of pandemics but also wars and conflicts and other kind of economic situations as well. So there's a lot to kind of work through to be able to make that happen. So I can understand why actually, countries need to learn from each other and work out kind of what works.
Let's think through kind of the why a bit more. Because I think we're clear on what the direct benefits to children's health is, in terms of them, getting a consistent source of healthy, nutritious meals in schools. But I know that there are other benefits, too. And I wonder to having kind of a really good school meals program. What are those benefits and what would incentivize countries to make that investment like you said, you know, the vast majority of this is from the domestic purse. So help me understand that kind of the economics and the stacking up.
15:44 Donald Bundy: And you're right. So countries are paying for this because they think it's a good investment. And you know our calculations are that it for every dollar invested in these programs you get a return of something between $7 and $30 back, and that those are actual estimates from a range of countries, and so that those are substantial returns, and they don't come from just one sector. That's really the important point. It takes a sort of ministry of finance view to recognize the value of this, because let's start with health. We've talked about health, but we've talked about it almost as though it's about hunger and things. But, if you set a child on the right trajectory in terms of their diet at an early stage in life. You can also address a whole range of other issues like obesity, like diabetes, and like the non-communicable diseases of middle age, which are 80% of what we spend our NHS money on. These are things you can tackle. You can save money in the long term by investing in health early.
16:48 Jane Goodland: So, really, that's about, I guess you know, those formative years making sure that children have access to good food, nutritious food. So they make better choices later on, so that they don't kind of then have these kind of what I guess what people call lifestyle related diseases later in life, which, of course, costs countries a lot. What other benefits are there.
17:08 Donald Bundy: So those health benefits spill over to affect education. So you know, the one thing in this world that most governments seem to agree on is that compulsory, free, universal education is a good investment in their nation. But what's become increasingly clear is you can't really get a good education if you don't have the well-being to learn. This is something we talk about now more in the UK than we ever did, and achieving that well-being is about school health and about school nutrition. So you know, one way of looking at this from an economics point of view is that the world invests about 2.8 trillion dollars in education, primary and secondary education. And that that needs to be leveraged by the well-being of those children. So every dollar that goes into their well-being leverages an enormous investment that's already there for their education. But that's not all. The other key issue. And I mentioned this before the realization. This is a social safety net for kids. This is protection for kids, more than 420 million children are being fed every day. It's not a trivial, it's not a trivial support. And each of those children the value of those meals is about 10% of parental income. Every child that goes to school. That means that there's this big return to parents if they send their children to school, and it's per child. So if you send 3 children. It's 30%, you know. So it's very substantial as safety nets go. But that's again not all. Because then there's this big agricultural return. So one interesting world fact is that the US, The U.S.A. created its school meals program during the depression as a way of creating a stable market for its midwestern farmers, and it's the Us. Department of Agriculture that still runs the school meals program in.
19:02 Jane Goodland: Interesting, isn't it? You'd never well, I would never imagine that would be the genesis of school meals in the US. So yeah, that is fascinating, and is, that is that the same for most countries in terms of the connection between the agricultural sector and school meals, for example.
19:18 Donald Bundy: So it's increasingly the case. And I'm going to just mention Nigeria in this context. Nigeria has gone from feeding 1 million children to 10 million children. It's used it as a yeah. And I'm talking now about a sustainable program that's been well monitored and well evaluated. That's actually a good return on investment. It's 1 of the ones that we've looked at closely. And so the Nigerian Government, too, sees this. That's not the only reason they're doing it. But that's one good part of why there's a big return overall. All of those sectoral returns add up to a significant benefit for every dollar invested in the program.
20:00 Jane Goodland: And when you look at it like that, then it really underscores why, it's so important for governments to really think about this holistically. Because I suppose if you looked at the return on investment, if you were only sort of thinking about it in the context of, say, your education budget, for example, you probably wouldn't see those wider benefits. So a whole of a whole of government approach is needed which actually brings me on quite nicely to topics that we kind of often talk about on this podcast, which is around things like climate, etc, which again, probably need a whole of government approach and we know that sustainability is, in fact, like a web of interconnected issues. You know none of these issues are kind of isolated in real terms. So we've talked through kind of the link between school meals and the benefits associated with children's health and long term population health as well as the links to the domestic economy, for example, from agriculture. But are there kind of broader links to big global issues like climate change? How do these things connect together?
21:08 Donald Bundy: So the climate change issue is actually huge. You know, if we think about climate change, most of the Cops, most of the language we hear about is fossil fuel, related languages, and that's, you know, getting on for two thirds of the problem. But you know, one third of the problem is, food. Food creates a third of the world's greenhouse gases. That's you know. That's something that clearly we've not paid enough attention to. In fact, the cops it was cop 28 before food was on the agenda and I can tell you we were there at Cop 28, and we were on the main stage at Cop 28, with a particular, with a particular storyline, which was, which was to say that we need to do something about food. As I say, a third of greenhouse gas is due to food. A 3rd of those losses are due to food waste. What can we do about that? The other two thirds are about eating the wrong foods, not eating sustainable food sources, and you know that's, you know, looks all very self-evident. But the big story, of course. And if you've read Lancet and those great analyses on this we talk about a flexitarian diet, or a Vegan diet, or a less meat diet. But how do you get to those diets? We have trouble keeping going. If we want to lose a few pounds right? We as adults, it's a very tough thing to do.
But if you want to actually establish a global change in eating habits. Well, where do you start? Well, you start with the kids and providing the right foods in schools, providing resilient foods produced in the right way in schools, making that the standard that children grow up with is a key way to change global eating habits. And that's a big part. Now of the messaging governments are very interested in this as a key part of the messaging, not least because of all the food sources of sorry of all the food that children eat it's school meals where governments have their most, having most of the policy levers actually already in their hands. They control these programs. So they can actually require that the schools provide food that's produced by regenerative agriculture, for example, that the power of procurement also is brought in, brought into play. And if I can just, Jane, just tell you that so in East Africa something rather unattractively called the orange fleshed sweet potato, which nutritionists have been promoting for a long time, because it's actually a micronutrient rich staple has become extremely popular because it was introduced into schools, so that the children go home. They say, Well, I want these orange, sweet potatoes, not those white ones that I'm getting at home because they're much better for me. And then you see much more development of those kinds of products by the by the farmers themselves. They respond to that, and interestingly mainly by women farmers, but sweet potatoes, legumes, and such like, are mainly produced by female smallholder farmers. And we see a particularly big impact in that area. So really a time for change, a whole new area of school meals thinking around, how can we be sustainable? How can we respect the sovereignty of food in the countries we're working with.
24:34 Jane Goodland: Yeah, it's fascinating to think about. It's not just about the nutrition level of the meal that the children are getting. But it's also that wider, sourcing impact and kind of where the food comes from, how it's how it's produced, etc. Do you know off the top of your head like how much money say, a country like the UK. Would spend every year on its kind of school meals.
24:57 Donald Bundy: I don't precisely know that figure because the UK is very complicated in the way in which, yeah, because of the Uk. We have a devolved nation system. Every one of them has a different school meals program different, a different price. Different value of meals provided different providers. It's an area of great discussion, actually interest. But what I can say is that that the world spends 48 billion dollars on school meals overall. And I can tell you that the that the UK says that the that the right amount to spend on a school meal is £3.16 pence, and I could explain to you why it's so precise and not sure I agree with it.
25:38 Jane Goodland: I think I mean globally, that numbers like staggering right. And I should imagine that there's always a drive to be able to understand how you drive value for money in terms of what that return on that investment is. So, things thinking kind of holistically about kind of wider issues associated with climate and the impact on our agricultural processes is presumably quite helpful in terms of thinking about that wider picture. So, thinking a bit more about kind of policy levers, and how governments could use that kind of drive around kind of long-term systemic change. Presumably there has to be a certain mindset or a certain beliefs in place to make a government do that, and certainly very, very long term. Multi-generational thinking like our countries. Good at that you know, how? How are we? How are we kind of, how are we doing on that? And what other? Yeah, are there actually any good examples where you say that's a country who seems to be getting it right.
26:38 Donald Bundy: So it's a wonderful question. But of course, let's just look at the evidence. I mean, I think that's the right way. So there are countries are spending 48 billion. 98% of that is domestic funds. Let's be very clear. There's very little international support for these programs. They're supported by the nations, the nation’s themselves. We're seeing an increasing number of countries signing up. There's a real movement now towards these universal school meals. So we're seeing a real change, I can tell you. In the European Union countries, for example, 26 of the 27 have school meals programs, and nearly 50% of those are universal school meals programs in the US states which run their school meals programs are moving towards universal school meals programs. So California, one of the largest States, has a universal as a universal program. But we're also seeing countries like not like we're seeing. Specifically, we're seeing Canada step up and say, we want to have a national program. Previously, they've had programs for some specific groups, but now they want to have an again a universal approach, and then Denmark and Norway are also moving into this. Meanwhile there are other countries that have been doing universal programs for 80 years. Sweden, Finland, Japan, and new countries doing exactly the same South Korea joining that list. So we're seeing that. But I'd like to point out that the biggest programs in the world are not the programs in the rich countries, the biggest programs in the world. The biggest of all is in India, where they feed 90 million children every day, universal free program in all public schools and Brazil 40 million every day universal free program in all public schools. And in the case of Brazil, 30% of that money coming from family farms. To get back to the point I was making.
Donald Bundy: So we're not seeing a discouraging picture at all globally. This is, in fact, a very, very positive figure. I mean, I think the UK. It's extraordinary that the UK. Isn't doing more in this area. Frankly, they're not part of the school meals coalition, despite having themselves a school meals program for 130 years that survived 30 changes of government. They've got a lot to share with the rest of the world, but they, for whatever reason, decided not to step up on that maybe I could make a final point, which is that the big movement that's happening now, globally, is the creation of a school meals impact accelerator countries aren't asking for money to maintain their programs. They're finding that those resources. But some countries want some help to actually scale up what they're doing. And that's why it's called an impact accelerator. So I mentioned Nigeria. Nigeria's gone from one to 10 million children. Now it wants to go from 10 million to 20 million. That's a step up. It needs some help to step up, even though it will pay for the food and all of the programs Indonesia has decided to launch its national program. 30 million children are being targeted
Again it would be very helpful if there was a fund that could help with that, and so much of our occupation around, how do we support and invest globally in this is to create a school meals, impact accelerator fund. And already some of the big foundations Rockefeller Foundation have already made commitments to take that to take that forward. So it's that's the that's the frontier. At the moment.
30:22 Jane Goodland: That’s so fascinating Don and I think its really shown that we really should rethink the school meal because its more than simply filling some child’s tummy in the middle of the day. It's about so much more than that. It's about kind of the health of our nation and the future prosperity of the world. So yes, a lot to think about. Thank you so much for all the work you do and also sharing that with us today and the listeners. So thank you once again.
30:49 Donald Bundy: My pleasure. Thank you so much, Jane, for listening, giving us this opportunity.
30:54 Jane Goodland: So that's it for this episode, and I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Don Bundy from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Incredible to think how school dinners could, in fact, change the world. If you've got questions, comments, or someone you'd like us to talk to, then do get in touch by email at fmt@lseg.com, that's all from me. But watch out for the next episode very soon.
