With the aim of increasing students' enrollment rate and improvising the quality of education by improving the health status of children, a school meal program was started in Nepal in 1967 AD. Since then, the school meal programs have been quite efficacious in Nepal that has been able to fulfill just the basic nutritional standard set by the government, i.e., the availability of 30% of nutritional needs for school going children. That’s when the “Smiling Children Program (School Feeding)” introduced in Nepal, planning to step further by making the availability of additional nutritional needs (up to 48% nutrition fulfillment).

Along with educational impact, the project plans to reduce the Anemia, underweight, dwarfness and zinc deficiency major health related issues that the children face because of malnutrition. So, the intervention of the project is to improve the education of the children considering the deficiency of the malnutrition with the nutritional food support based on the standard of “WHO”. Apart from meal support to targeted school children of selected community schools, the program also provides employment opportunities to the mothers of beneficiary children for meal preparation and feeding activities. In addition to these, mothers’ groups have been benefitted with various trainings like Food Safety and Hygiene Training, Kitchen and Warehouse Management Training, Fire Safety Training, etc. Following the need, with the support of China Foundation for Rural Development (CFRD), Global Cooperation for Development (GCD) has been implementing the Smiling Children Program (School Feeding) since 2022 AD. The main purpose of the program is to support improvised school-going children (ECD to 5), lacking sufficient nourishment, primarily targeting SDG 2 (Zero hunger), while contributing to SDG 4 (Quality Education) and SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being). As far as we come to August 2025, Smiling Children Program (School Feeding) has benefitted 17,329 students across 50 community schools of Kathmandu Metropolitan City, Lalitpur Metropolitan City, Kirtipur Municipality, Godawari Municipality and Nagarjun Municipality.