Global School Meals Atlas
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Comparative financing

Four questions about school feeding money: where it comes from, how it reaches the school, how much it is e how it is executed. Each panel shows the actual coverage of the data — how many countries have the information recorded and how many do not — because absence of a record is not absence of a policy.

Funding source classified
91 / 193
102 countries without classification in the reviewed sources
Transfer mechanism classified
55 / 193
138 without an identified mechanism
Specific tax identified
1 / 193
structural gap — see the final panel
Legal nature of the programme
193 / 193
the only fiscal field with full coverage
Deeper analysisPublic vs. private financing →composition profiles, who pays × who delivers, cost per child and consistency between records

Where the money comes from

Classes of funding source recorded in the fiscal layer. A country may have more than one source; the bar total is greater than the number of countries. Click a class to see the countries.

Donors and international agencies 44
Family contributions 40
General national/state budget 16
Education sector budget 13
Private sector/philanthropy 8
Subnational local budget 6
In-kind food donation 6
Social protection funds 4
Conditional/earmarked transfer 4
Civil society/NGO 3
Community contribution 2
Agricultural policy funds 1
Not classified in the reviewed sources102

How the money reaches the school

Recorded transfer mechanisms. It is the scarcest field in the fiscal layer — 138 of the 193 countries have no identified mechanism — but the most useful for comparing institutional designs.

Direct transfer to schools 23
Execution through own local budget 14
Agreement/co-financing between federative entities 6
Transfer conditional on a subnational entity 5
Per-enrolment/per-beneficiary formula 5
Amount per student/day 4
Direct payment to the supplier 4
Centralised procurement and distribution 3
Automatic transfer between federative entities 1
Not classified in the reviewed sources138

Legal nature of the programme

Full coverage (193/193). Indicates which instrument the programme rests on — from a national law to a policy with no legal basis of its own.

official policy/programme93
national law41
decree/regulation38
no national programme identified11
subnational only5
official policy/programme; no national programme identified2
national law; official policy/programme1
official policy/programme; general framework law1
national law; decree/regulation1

How much, and how much is procured locally

Declared budget in dollars (123 countries) and share of food purchased domestically (105 countries). The local share is the only continuous indicator comparable to the Brazilian family-farming purchase floor. Click the headers to re-sort.

0 countries in the selection

CountryBudget (USD)Domestic procurementLegal nature

Brazil — how the funding is calculated

The only country in the Atlas record base with the calculation rule and the execution chain documented end to end. Source: Resolução CD/FNDE nº 4/2026 (evidence A).

Federal transfer formulaVT = A × D × C; 200 school days; eight annual instalments between February and September.
Education modalityAmount per student/day
Primary, secondary and EJA (youth and adult education)R$ 0,57
pré-escolaR$ 0,82
Indigenous, quilombola and traditional-community areasR$ 0,98
full-time schooling of at least 7hR$ 1,57
crechesR$ 1,57
support for full-time secondary educationR$ 2,93
AEE (specialised support) after hoursR$ 0,78.

Brasil — how the funds are executed

Federal budget chain of budget action 00PI in 2025. Each stage is a distinct step: commitment reserves the funds, verification recognises the debt, payment transfers it, and carried-over payables settle previous financial years. None of them on its own is equivalent to "school meals spending".

Empenhado
R$ 5.568.692.069
100% of the committed amount
Liquidado
R$ 5.539.411.659
99,5% of the committed amount
Pago
R$ 5.538.221.693
99,5% of the committed amount
Restos pagos
R$ 32.409.889
0,6% of the committed amount

See monthly series and Brazil Profile detail →

What we still do not know

Which taxes fund school feeding — a structural gap in the record base. Of the 193 countries, 1 has a specific tax identified in the reviewed sources (Romania: VAT_shared_or_earmarked). In the others, the sources describe funding as general budget without naming the source tax — 34 countries explicitly record "general public budget identified, specific tax not identified".

This does not mean that no taxes are financing: it means that tax → programme traceability has not been surveyed. Answering this question requires a new research front, country by country, on constitutional earmarks, sector funds and revenue sharing — in Brazil, for example, the education-salary levy, FUNDEB and the article 212 constitutional earmark are not mapped as PNAE funding sources in the current compendium.
Outras lacunas declaradas. The commitment→payment chain is closed only for the federal level: at the subnational level, 11 of the 27 federative units have no budget observation at all and only 8.7% of the records carry a normalised numeric value. The co-financing text in the global layer still cites the 30% family farming floor, which predates Lei nº 11.947/2009's successor Lei nº 15.226/2025, raising the minimum to 45% as of 1 January 2026 — the global layer requires revalidation. The budget expressed in dollars is neither per capita nor adjusted for purchasing power: it serves to indicate orders of magnitude, not comparative efficiency.

Author and maintainer: Joelcio Carvalho · Data and method: repository compendio-alimentacao-escolar-brasil · The visualisations organise the available evidence and make comparisons explicit; they do not constitute a merit ranking or a legal opinion. Score, evidence and confidence are always presented separately.