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Imperial College London’s Partnership for Child Development (PCD) has signed an agreement with the Federal Government of Nigeria to facilitate the country’s school feeding programme.

The agreement comes after President Muhammadu Buhari announced in December that his administration plans to spend N500 billion in 2016 to fund social welfare programmes, including school feeding, conditional cash transfers, and youth employment schemes.

The national school-feeding programme, also known as Home Grown School Feeding, will roll out in January 2016, initially targeting one state from each geopolitical zone.

The programme, which is Africa’s largest school-feeding programme, aims to provide a free meal every school day to 24 million primary school children in Nigeria.

Speaking after meeting Vice President Yemi Osinbajo to sign a formal Memorandum of Understanding, PCD’s Executive Director, Dr. Lesley Drake, said her organization would provide technical assistance to state governments to help design sustainable school feeding programmes to procure food from local smallholder farmers.

“With 1 in 4 of school-aged children in Africa being Nigerian, this programme has the potential to have a profound positive impact on the health, education and financial security of millions of families,” Drake said. “We are honoured to be invited by the Government of Nigeria to provide our expertise to help in the scale up of this ambitious and innovative national initiative.”

Since 2013, PCD has been providing technical assistance to Osun State in its school feeding programme, which provides free school meals to 250,000 primary school children using food sourced from local smallholder farmers.

PCD has a track record in supporting school feeding programmes in several African countries such as Kenya, Ghana, Ethiopia, Mali, Tanzania, Uganda and Madagascar.

Chibuike Oguh is Financial Nigeria's Frontier Markets Analyst