Mary’s Meals reaches major milestone feeding 3 million children

Now serving vital meals to more than 3 million children every school day

Published on 08 Sep 2025

As children in the global north return to school after the long summer holiday period, school feeding charity Mary’s Meals is marking a powerful milestone: now serving vital meals to more than 3 million children every school day – an extraordinary increase of around 800,000 children since the start of 2024.

For children living in areas affected by climate change, acute food insecurity or the aftermath of conflict, the promise of a meal served in a place of education can be the difference between attending school or staying home. There are currently 71 million primary school-age children who are out of school – a figure higher than the total number of children enrolled in primary education in the UK, Europe, USA, and Canada – but research shows that effective school feeding creates a powerful incentive to attend.

Mary’s Meals Founder and CEO, Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, explains:

We’ve chosen the 8th of September for celebrating that we feed over 3 million children every school day because this is the day we celebrate Our Lady’s birthday. So, on this day we give it back to her all this work. Mary´s Meals is hers! This is our humble birthday present to her.

This milestone follows a major scale-up of Mary’s Meals’ school feeding programmes across nine countries, seeing hundreds of thousands of children added to the programme over an 18-month period, including in Malawi, Haiti, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Sudan, and Ethiopia.

To mark this historic moment in the fight to end child hunger, Mary’s Meals is making a renewed call for global support for its school feeding programmes that target children living in high-need and hard-to-reach areas. And as more than a quarter of all children worldwide face severe food poverty in early childhood (27%) amounting to more than 181 million children under five, the need for consistent school feeding programmes has never been more acute. Mary’s Meals Founder and CEO, Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, continues:

This landmark is less a celebration than it is a call to action. We invite every person of good will to join the Mary’s Meals movement so that our vision – that every child in this world receives one daily meal in their place of education – might be realised. Whilst it is an amazing thing that this work has grown to reach 3 million children, the sad reality is that tens of millions of children remain hungry and out of school.

The growth of Mary’s Meals is testament to the number of people who believe in its vision –that every child should receive a meal at school – and who share their time and resources to make this vision a reality.