[1998] POLLIT, Ernesto; JACOBY, Enrique; CUETO, Santiago. «Evaluation of a school breakfast program in Peru». En: Nutrition, health, and child development. Washington, D.C.: PAHO; World Bank. p. 119-127.

In 1993, the government of Peru, through the Compensatory Fund for Social Development (Fondo de Compensación para el Desarrollo Social [FONCODES]), launched a school breakfast program in five Andean departments to promote better nutrition and improve educational achievement and attendance among children enrolled in public primary schools.

The program was established to help offset the social costs of the economic adjustment policies implemented by the Peruvian government since late in 1990. The nutritional and operational aspects of the program were delegated to the Nutritional Research Institute, a local, private, non-profit organization devoted to search in nutrition.

In that same year, two studies were begun in Huaraz (elevation 3,300m) in one of the five departments targeted for assessing the educational and nutritional impact of the school breakfast program. One was a laboratory-type study designed to test the effects of breakfast consumption on cognition among 54 elementary school children (ages 9 to 11 years) who were either well nourished or nutritionally at risk. The other was a field evaluation of the feeding program in 10 rural schools on the periphery of Huaraz.

In this chapter we briefly describe the methods and main findings from both studies and then compare them with findings already published in the available literature.