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 agencies44
Family contributions40
General national/state budget16
Education sector budget13
Private sector/philanthropy8
Subnational local budget6
In-kind food donation6
Social protection funds4
Conditional/earmarked transfer4
Civil society/NGO3
Community contribution2
Agricultural policy funds1
Not classified in the reviewed sources102
There is a classification proposal for some of the unclassified ones.The financing narratives exist for all 193 countries — what was missing was converting them into a structured class.The scriptscripts/propor_origem_recurso.pyproposes classes for65countries from each country's own narrative and requires a verified verbatim citation: each class carries the exact passage of the narrative that supports it, checked by substring matching, and fabricated evidence is rejected automatically.Nos37remaining ones the narrative genuinely does not name the source, and that is recorded as a legitimate answer, not as a failure.If accepted, the composition coverage rises from91para156de193.
Nothing was overwritten:the proposal appears flagged in each country's detail.
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 schools23
Execution through own local budget14
Agreement/co-financing between federative entities6
Transfer conditional on a subnational entity5
Per-enrolment/per-beneficiary formula5
Amount per student/day4
Direct payment to the supplier4
Centralised procurement and distribution3
Automatic transfer between federative entities1
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 US dollars (122countries)
and share of food purchased within the country (105countries).
The local share is the only continuous indicator comparable to the Brazilian family-farming procurement floor.Click the column headers to re-sort.
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
settles commitments from previous financial years — no % over the 2025 committed amount
This question was declared a gap in the record base. For Brazil it has an answer with a primary source, and the answer is not in the PNAE law: it is in the budget law. Each finding below was checked against the consolidated text at Planalto or the official PDF by a second reviewer, who corrected misattributed provisions and rejected non-verbatim citations.
AnswerSalário-educação social contribution2.5% on the payroll · source 1133 in the budget law · the link is established by the annual budget law, not by a permanent earmark
Tax earmark (art. 212)
does not fund
school feeding is not an MDE expense — LDB, art. 71, IV
FUNDEB
prohibited by law
Lei nº 14.113/2020, art. 29, I
Salário-educação
funds
CF art. 212, §§ 4º e 5º · LOA, ação 00PI integralmente na fonte 1133
The caveat that prevents the wrong reading: the MDE prohibition covers the purchase of foodstuffs. Processing and preparation — gas, utensils, equipment and labour — may be counted as MDE as a supporting activity (LDB, art. 70, V, per the Espírito Santo audit court). Saying that "school feeding cannot be paid with MDE funds" is true of the food and false if generalised to the structure that prepares it.
The world — which tax pays for school meals
New tax research: the classes below do not replace the earlier fiscal layer or apply proposals to the collection.
The Brazilian mapping showed where to look: in the budget law, not in the programme law. 28countries were put to the same question, each with primary-source research, adversarial review and — where a named tax was claimed — a third reading that rebuilt the chain from scratch, without seeing the earlier work, instructed to under-report when in doubt.
What was learnedAlmost no country pays for school meals with an earmarked taxde 28countries, 1has a named tax earmarked by law to school feeding · the everyday question "which tax pays for school meals" usually has no answer — and that is a finding, not a gap
earmarked by law
1
Named tax, earmarked by law to school feeding
eligible, not earmarked
5
Named tax reaches the programme, but the destination is eligible or administrative, not a legal earmark
transfer, no named tax
6
A legal earmark exists, but to a transfer or a fund — no tax is named
no tax located
16
No tax located: general budget
The distinction that decides the cases. Earmarking
a tax e vincular a slice of a fund are not the same thing, and confusing the two produces the wrong answer in both directions. Mexico and Colombia have a strong legal earmark — and no named tax: the law earmarks a share of a federal transfer without saying which tax it comes from.
And a spending floor is not a tax earmark: Egypt and Indonesia mandate the spending — 4% of gross national product, 20% of the budget — without earmarking any revenue.
When torn between two classes, the archive drops to the weaker one: it prefers to under-report.
No global record in this selection. A missing record does not mean no funding; Brazil has separate research above.
A record in the archive itself goes under review.
The fiscal layer records Romania as the only one of the 193 countries with a specific tax identified (VAT_shared_or_earmarked). The primary-source re-reading sustains half of that: the Romanian budget law names VAT ("sume defalcate din taxa pe valoarea adăugată"), but does not earmark a rate, a percentage or a share — Parliament sets a cash amount in law each year. The internal proof is Romania's own local-finance law, which knows how to create a percentage earmark (41.75% of income tax to municipalities, art. 32 of Law no. 273/2006) and não use that instrument for school feeding. The archive was not overwritten: the divergence is recorded here, with its evidence, awaiting human review — like every proposal in this project.
What we still do not know
Which taxes fund school feeding — answered in 29countries, open in164.
Brasil e mais 28countries were surveyed in primary sources (the two sections above).That leaves164of the 193 without tax → programme traceability.This does not mean that no taxes are financing in those countries — it means nobody followed the chain to the legal text.
And the survey showed why the work is slow: dos28countries, 1has a named tax earmarked by law to school feeding. In the other27the right answer is not the name of a tax — it is one of the three forms of "not quite" that the section above separates. Anyone expecting to find a school-meals tax in every country will find it where it does not exist.
The archive's fiscal layer still carries the old classification: 1 of the 193 countries with a specific tax identified (Romania: VAT_shared_or_earmarked), and
34 countries with "general public budget identified, specific tax not identified". None of this was overwritten — neither the field
specific_tax_identified
for Brazil, which remains false, nor Romania's, whose re-reading is recorded above. Reconciling the two layers requires first deciding a question of method: whether the field admits a link established by the annual budget law, whether it admits a merely eligible destination, and whether it admits a fund share with no named tax. These are three distinct decisions, and each moves a different set of countries.
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.
Each budget comes from a different vintage (2018–2023):
sorting the column puts different budget years side by side; the source vintage appears below each value.
The funding-source and transfer-mechanism records declare no reference date.