Tanzania Shifts School Meals to Climate-Smart Foods Offering Lessons for India

A programme at Babati Secondary School and other institutions in Tanzania is successfully shifting school meal menus toward climate-resilient, nutritious foods including finger millet and pigeon pea, overcoming cultural resistance through education and improved preparation. The approach offers practical lessons for India's school feeding programmes as it seeks to integrate climate-smart diets.

In Babati town in Tanzania, school meals featuring finger millet porridge and pigeon pea stew — foods once dismissed as unfashionable or inferior — are gaining acceptance as part of a deliberate effort to improve nutrition and promote climate-adapted food systems. By improving recipes, involving students in food preparation and providing nutrition education, the programme has successfully changed student perceptions of traditional crops that are more drought-tolerant, nutritionally dense and environmentally sustainable than refined grain alternatives.

The Tanzania model carries direct implications for India's own school feeding infrastructure, which operates at an enormous scale through the PM POSHAN mid-day meal programme serving over 120 million children nationally. India's agricultural biodiversity includes traditional millets, pulses and other climate-resilient crops that are nutritionally superior and less water-intensive than wheat and polished rice, yet remain underrepresented in institutional feeding programmes. The government has included millet promotion under the International Year of Millets legacy, but mainstreaming these crops in school menus has been uneven.

Education and cultural acceptance are identified as critical barriers alongside procurement and supply chain challenges. The Tanzania experience shows that bottom-up engagement with students and cooks, combined with recipe innovation, can overcome resistance to dietary change more effectively than top-down mandates. Indian states piloting millet integration in mid-day meal programmes are beginning to document similar cultural acceptance challenges, and Tanzania's practical approach to overcoming them may offer a replicable methodology.

Key figure — 120 million children — scale of India's PM POSHAN mid-day meal programme and potential climate-smart diet reach