From 1989 until today, Cote d’Ivoire set up 5,259 canteens across the country. Recently, an international colloqium on school canteens was held which reminded me of an essay about Hunger & Poverty I wrote that resumes this model.

Farmers can well perform as farmer-entrepreneurs with the environment surrounding them transformed into a living economic & social area.
We advocate the necessity to form community support systems that enterprise social actions & seek financial strength while realizing many additional revenues can be generated within agriculture practice.
Many collective bodies already exist among farmers, but too often to discuss day-to-day issues they face. We recommend a more proactive approach beyond reactivity where the farmers come together with an entrepreneurial zeal to improve social and economic conditions.
In Ivory Coast, the national school canteens program (meant to feed all children and prevent non education) owes its relative success in rural areas, thanks partly to such groups.

Here’s how the basic model works: an authorization request to open a canteen has to emanate from the village community and then is granted by the Ministry of Education.
Beforehand, the village provides parcels to grow crops, small cattle and sometimes go even by building the canteen; other upfront costs are taken care by the government/international agencies. Then the village empower a women group (as non-export crops are traditionally grown by women) to exploit the land and provide local-grown goods on a regular basis to the canteen as well as divert a part for commercialization.
Then, we have a committee formed by the school management and villagers to overview daily operations that appoints a canteen manager and women cooks. Both get remunerated with each child paying an affordable 5 cents per day, the excess serving to buy additional vegetables not grown on lands and support very poor children exempted from paying this sum on discriminative criteria set by the committee.
The model has proven very successful in rural areas and in 2004, already covered 45% of the total number of schools with other countless benefits.

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The essay ‘Youth Poverty and Hunger Eradication’ can be downloaded here http://www.scribd.com/doc/13710249/Youth-Poverty-and-Hunger-Eradication-2008
More about the School canteens model in Ivory Coast http://www.panapress.com/cantine/actualite.asp?code=eng049