School meals need a payment calendar for farmers

A school meal programme can promise a dependable market to local farmers while leaving them uncertain about when they will be paid. For a small supplier, that uncertainty affects the next planting, transport and household spending. Procurement policy needs to treat the payment calendar as part of the programme's relationship with agriculture.

The World Food Programme's State of School Feeding Worldwide 2024, published in 2025, connects school meals with the food systems supplying them. The Food and Agriculture Organization likewise identifies inclusive procurement as an area in which governments can help smaller producers participate. These are useful foundations for debate in Ghana and elsewhere. They do not show that every local purchasing arrangement achieves the same results.

A third perspective comes from the joint UNESCO, UNICEF and WFP report on school health and nutrition. It places nutrition within the conditions that allow children to learn. That purpose must remain central. Buying locally has to help deliver a suitable, reliable meal; a procurement target cannot excuse poor food or interrupted service.

Payment design is one place where these objectives meet. A farmer may be able to supply a modest quantity consistently but unable to finance a long gap between delivery and payment. A contract open to small producers on paper can therefore favour larger businesses in practice. The barrier lies in working capital rather than the farmer's willingness or ability to grow the food.

Officials could publish realistic payment stages, identify the documents needed at each stage and provide a way to query an overdue invoice. Delivery confirmation should be simple enough to use while retaining an adequate audit record. If several offices must approve payment, suppliers need to know which office currently holds the decision. An unexplained delay is especially difficult to plan around.

This is not a proposal to pay unverified bills. Public money requires checks, and disputes about quantity or quality need a fair procedure. The improvement is to separate a disputed part of a delivery from an entire account wherever the rules allow. Holding up every payment because one item needs clarification can spread a limited problem across an otherwise functioning supply relationship.

Seasonality also requires honest planning. Menus and supply contracts need enough flexibility to use appropriate local foods when they are available. Schools cannot improvise around every failed delivery, so procurement teams need backup arrangements. Those arrangements should be disclosed rather than concealed behind an unrealistic promise that every ingredient will always come from the immediate community.

Farmers' organisations can reduce some transaction costs, but membership is not a universal remedy. A cooperative still needs competent administration and money to meet its own obligations. Programme designers should examine whether an intermediary improves farmers' access or simply transfers the same payment uncertainty to another layer.

Monitoring could bring together the number of meals served, the suitability of the food and the experience of suppliers. Payment timeliness is a measurable part of that account. Publishing an aggregate record would allow the public to see whether a programme supports the people expected to sustain it, without exposing individual farmers' private finances.

School meals deserve reliable funding because children need reliable provision. The local development argument becomes stronger when that reliability extends to the farmers and cooks doing the work. A procurement policy that celebrates local participation should be able to show when those participants receive what they are owed.

Swaansh Mahat is an independent writer and English-language educator based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He writes about education, public services and everyday institutional life.