LBF recognises that children cannot be educated or grow with insufficient nutritional intake. Our Nutrition Programme is arranged around our primary goal which is to uphold a child's right to a basic education. No child should be kept from learning by hunger or household food insecurity. LBF provides a daily hot school meal of nutritionally fortified foods to impoverished and at risk children attending early childhood development centres (ECDCs), Educational Playgroups, primary and secondary schools in South Africa, and after-school homework and skills development programs.

We aim to facilitate children's education through offering a behavioural incentive for children to attend and stay in schools and creches, and through helping them to concentrate and learn while there. These are important steps for children in reaching their full potential as adults and in breaking the intergenerational cycles of poverty and vulnerability.

The Lunchbox Fund provides a monthly rotating menu of nutritionally fortified meals for children in township schools and Early Childhood Development Centers across all 9 provinces of South Africa. It costs 25¢for one meal that includes a full RDA of macro- and micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals. The school is also required to source locally grown vegetables from within the community. We provide each school with one month's worth of food at a time, and the local women we employ ensure that the food is prepared and served properly.

We currently serve children across all 9 provinces of South Africa. Every school day, we provide 25,000 children with hot meals. Every school has a clean facility for preparing and serving the food. The Lunchbox Fund is a registered Non-Profit Organisation in South Africa and in the United States. A Board of Directors in both countries guides the organisation's mission, purpose and management.

LBF beneficiaries are vulnerable and food insecure children in South Africa. LBF South Africa is staffed by a Managing Director, a Director of Research and Strategy, and a Bookkeeping and Monitoring Manager. Independently contracted Fieldworks and Cooks ('Food Mamas') are essential to our Monitoring and Nutrition Programmes respectively. Fieldworkers are located provincially in all nine provinces of South Africa, and in schools of more than 80 children stipended Food Mamas are drawn from the local community.

Our United States entity is primarily focussed on fundraising, global policy and strategy, and our outward facing communications (such as our website and social media). Our Founding CEO is based in the United States, and a part-time administrator and one volunteer completes in-house capacity.

The Lunchbox Fund's staffing structure allows us to outsource additional capacity on a needs-only and deliverable basis to carefully selected, highly qualified partners - such our food supply and delivery company in South Africa, legal services, and independent auditors. In this way, we ensure we reduce our overhead costs and minimise financial risk.

Our progress is measured by the steady increase in children we have been able to serve since the founding of The Lunchbox Fund in 2005. The Lunchbox Fund (LBF) started simply by feeding 100 children most in need at a high school in Soweto and has since grown to feeding over 30,000 school children each school day (2019), ranging from 2 - 18 years old, nationwide across South Africa. LBF has embarked on a Pilot Impact Evaluation Study among a sample of 15 of its supported ECDCs to assess these indicators. Attendance and enrolment are already assessed through our existing Monitoring Programme. In-depth interviews with teachers will explore the impact of the Programme on children's hunger and ability to concentrate at school. Levels of child stunting and wasting are being measured at quarterly intervals to assess any changes in malnutrition status (where this is evident) over the period of a year. The Pilot will help us gauge our impact and contribute towards our ongoing reflective learning as we continuously work to strengthen our Nutrition Programme and its effect on people's lives. An important foundation for our impact is building our Programme on current global and national evidence-based principles. To this end, we commissioned the Nutrition Information Centre at the University of Stellenbosch (NICUS) to undertake an independent evaluation of our Nutrition Programme. NICUS concluded that LBF's menu makes a significant contribution to the dietary energy, protein and fat needs of its beneficiaries, and is particularly effective in delivering micronutrients.

We are on track with our projections. We became a fully national organisation in 2015, and increased the number of children we serve to 30,000. Our next goal is to serve 35,000 children a hot meal each school day by December 2020.