Zamfara transforming education through school meals — IFPRI, WFP
On the education front, Governor Lawal also received accolades from international stakeholders. On February 2026, a joint team from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the World Food Programme (WFP), alongside government partners from Nigeria’s National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP), visited Zamfara.
“Our mission was simple but urgent: to understand how the state’s school meal program—a recent effort, begun in 2025,” the international agencies said in a special report, “How school meals are transforming education in Zamfara State, Nigeria,” published on May 27, 2026.
“Zamfara has faced enormous education challenges. Poverty, insecurity, and weak infrastructure have left hundreds of thousands of children out of school. In 2023, Zamfara Executive Governor Dauda Lawal declared a state of emergency in education—a turning point that led to the launch of a range of new policies and programs on school rehabilitation, teacher recruitment, clearance of outstanding debts to examination bodies (leading to the release of withheld results for thousands of students), and renewed political focus on learning outcomes,” the IFPRI and WFP report said.
The report concluded that, “The lesson from Zamfara is simple but powerful: when nutritious school meals are provided in a reliable, consistent manner, children come, and they stay. In fragile and low-income settings, school feeding is not just a nutrition program. It is an education strategy, a gender strategy, a local economic strategy, and a resilience strategy.”
As Zamfara’s Rescue Mission revolution marks its third anniversary, the verdict from everywhere is clear: Orchids for Governor Dauda Lawal.
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