School gardens are most valuable when they connect education, nutrition, school meals, climate resilience, local markets, entrepreneurship and community ownership. Their success depends on both good practice and the systems that sustain it.

Why good school gardens disappear

School gardens have been promoted for decades because the idea is compelling. Children can learn science through soil, nutrition through food preparation and enterprise through selling surplus produce.

Yet many programmes follow a familiar trajectory. A garden is launched, tools and seeds arrive, the first harvest creates excitement, and then activity gradually declines.

The problem is often institutional, not agricultural. By institutional, I mean the arrangements that determine who owns the school farm as an ongoing school function, who manages it day to day, who provides recurrent financing, how school leaders protect time for it, and who is accountable when external project support ends.

Too many initiatives begin with infrastructure, seeds and enthusiasm but without protected timetable space, recurrent budgets, farm management arrangements or clear links to school meals and markets. When project funding ends, responsibility for water, inputs, repairs and farm supervision is often unclear: the school may value the garden but lack a budget line, while teachers, parent groups or local partners are left to absorb costs informally. The Food and Agriculture Organization's approach to school-based food and nutrition education points instead towards connecting classroom learning, school food environments, gardens and wider food systems¹.

Our experience in Ghana illustrates the problem. At Ho Dome R.C. Junior High School, limited time, land, fencing and day-to-day farm support constrained productivity. At Vane E.P. Junior High School, one of the clearest lessons was that dedicated time within the school schedule and visible support from school leadership were essential for sustained participation².

These are not minor implementation issues. They reveal a deeper design problem: we keep treating school agriculture as a project when it needs to become part of a system. In practice, that means moving beyond a one-off garden to an arrangement with protected learning time, a designated teacher or farm focal person, recurrent financing for basic operations, clear links to meals or markets, technical support from agriculture services and community actors, and simple monitoring of learning, production and nutrition outcomes.

Mr Richmond Gyamfi, a teacher at Ho Dome R.C. Junior High School in Ghana, delivers a lesson in the net garden as students listen attentively. Photo credit: School Farms, Ghana (2025).

From a garden to a food system innovation hub

Instead of asking how to start more school gardens, we should ask how schools can become local food system innovation hubs.

FAO describes agrifood systems as the interconnected people, activities and choices involved in growing, processing, transporting, trading, purchasing, preparing, consuming and disposing of food³. These systems shape nutrition, livelihoods and environmental outcomes. Schools already connect young people, teachers, families, kitchens, public resources and recurring demand for food.

This is the logic behind School Farms, a nonprofit organisation in Ghana's CENS+ model: Climate, Education, Nutrition and Skills, with inclusion running across the approach. Since 2024, the model has been piloted in two junior high schools in Ghana's Volta Region, combining greenhouse and open-field production with practical learning, nutrition education and student enterprise. Across the first implementation year, the farms produced more than four tonnes of food, while nutrition learning and student pop-up markets introduced pricing, weighing, record-keeping and reinvestment⁴.

Sen's capabilities approach helps explain why these outcomes matter⁵. A school farm should be judged not only by yield, but also by the knowledge, agency, skills and opportunities it creates for young people.

What the world is already showing us

Countries are already assembling parts of this model. Kenya has linked hydroponic production with lessons and school meals⁶, while Rwanda's home-grown school feeding connects schools with domestic producers⁷. India's school garden programmes promote composting and efficient irrigation⁸. In the United States, farm-to-school programmes combine local purchasing with gardens, agricultural education and nutrition⁹.

The arrangements differ because context matters. The common lesson is that school-based food initiatives endure when they are connected to education systems, public procurement, local economies and community institutions.

A three-part framework for sustainable school food systems

The framework below is proposed in this article. It synthesises lessons from School Farms' implementation experience with the wider evidence discussed above on school-based food and nutrition education, food systems, capabilities and adaptive governance. It organises sustainability into three connected elements: core practice commitments, enabling systems and cross-cutting standards. None can carry the hub alone; they must reinforce one another through continuous learning and adaptation.

1. Core practice commitments

• Integrate agriculture and nutrition into education systems: connect practical food production with nutrition knowledge, trained teachers and protected learning time
• Connect production to school feeding and local markets: complement existing procurement, sell appropriate surplus and reinvest proceeds
• Use climate-smart and agroecological methods: demonstrate efficient irrigation, composting, soil health, crop diversity and biodiversity
• Build community ownership: give parents, farmers, school managers and local authorities meaningful roles
• Treat entrepreneurship as practical learning: teach costing, record-keeping, value addition, marketing and reinvestment

2. Enabling systems

• Build implementation capacity: designate trained school focal persons and connect schools to technical support for farm management, learning and food safety
• Secure diversified and sustainable financing: combine public budgets, partnerships, earned income and community support
• Establish governance and accountability: define responsibilities, oversight, reporting and transparent use of resources
• Invest in essential infrastructure: provide reliable water, storage and food-safety facilities

3. Cross-cutting standards

• Embed youth agency and leadership across the framework: give students meaningful roles in decisions, implementation, peer learning, enterprise and monitoring
• Ensure gender-specific equity: address unequal access, leadership opportunities and safety risks
• Plan for risk and seasonality: anticipate droughts, school calendars, input shortages and market fluctuations
• Align with national policy: connect the hub to education, agriculture, school-feeding and climate programmes
• Track nutrition and health outcomes: measure whether production and learning improve diets, knowledge and wellbeing

Together, these elements turn the school farm from a temporary project into an adaptive institution. Core practices describe what the hub does; enabling systems describe what keeps it functioning; and the cross-cutting standards, shown as an outer layer in Figure 1, apply across both. This reflects adaptive governance, which emphasises learning, collaboration and the capacity to respond to changing conditions, allowing schools to become spaces where adaptation happens locally¹⁰.

Figure 1. Three-part framework for a sustainable school food system innovation hub. Concept and content by Alfred Adjabeng.

The public investment hiding in plain sight

Schools are among the most widely distributed public institutions in most countries. With the right support, they can become demonstration sites for climate-resilient agriculture, entry points for improved nutrition, markets for local producers and laboratories for youth enterprise.

The goal is not to make every school self-sufficient or shift responsibility for feeding children onto teachers and students. It is to position schools as active participants in resilient local food systems.

In Ghana, embedding this model would require institutions to work through their existing mandates rather than create a parallel project structure. The Ghana Education Service and school leadership could protect learning time, designate school focal persons and integrate the hub into school planning; the Ghana School Feeding Programme and district structures could create practical links between appropriate school production, local procurement and meals; and Ministry of Food and Agriculture extension services could provide technical advice on production, water management and climate-smart practices. District assemblies and school-level committees could help coordinate local oversight and recurrent needs. Development partners should then strengthen these capabilities and systems, rather than finance gardens and equipment alone. Schools should measure who participates, who benefits and whether nutrition, learning and wellbeing outcomes improve¹¹.

The question is no longer how many school gardens we can start. It is how many schools we can equip to keep learning, producing and innovating long after project funding ends.

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¹ (FAO, 2020, pp. 52)

² (School Farms, 2025)

³ (FAO, n.d.)

⁴ (School Farms, 2025)

⁵ (Sen, 2001)

⁶ (Bonnet, 2025)

⁷ (RAVESLOOT et al., 2025)

⁸ (Kommu, 2010)

⁹ (Machata et al., 2023, pp. 12, 93)

¹⁰ (Folke et al., 2005, pp. 449, 463)

¹¹ (Ghana Education Service, 2026; Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, n.d.; Ministry of Food and Agriculture, n.d.)

References

Bonnet, C. (2025, September 10). Feeding the future: Africa surges ahead on school meals | World Food Programme. https://www.wfp.org/stories/feeding-future-africa-surges-ahead-school-meals

FAO. (2020). School-based food and nutrition education. A white paper on the current state, principles, challenges and recommendations for low- and middle-income countries (1st edn). FAO. https://doi.org/10.4060/cb2064en

FAO. (n.d.). Agrifood systems. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. https://www.fao.org/food-systems/en

Folke, C., Hahn, T., Olsson, P., & Norberg, J. (2005). ADAPTIVE GOVERNANCE OF SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 30(1), 441–473. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.energy.30.050504.144511

Ghana Education Service. (2026). Ghana Education Service: mandate and administration of pre-tertiary education. https://www.ges.gov.gh/

Kommu, V. (2010). Students Grow Their Own Vegetables in School Yards. Field Actions Science Reports. The Journal of Field Actions, (Special Issue 1). https://journals.openedition.org/factsreports/434

Machata, N., Jennings, L., Morrison, H., & Boyle, M. (2023). 2023 Farm to School Census Report. Food and Nutrition Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED672973.pdf

Ministry of Food and Agriculture. (n.d.). Directorate of Agricultural Extension Services. https://mofa.gov.gh/site/directorates/technical-directorates/directorate-of-agricultural-extension-services

Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection. (n.d.). Ghana School Feeding Programme: institutional arrangements. https://demo-gsfp.mogcsp.gov.gh/Home/About

RAVESLOOT, B., BARBER, H., TUYIRINGIRE, J., MUTETERI, D., AZIZ, T., FINAN, P., BRANHAM, R., & MUELLER, M. (2025). USDA McGovern-Dole International Food forEducation and Child Nutrition Award for WFP Home-Grown School Feeding Project in Rwanda from 2020 to 2025 (DE/RWCO/2021/025). https://api.godocs.wfp.org/api/documents/WFP-0000171582/download/

School Farms. (2025). Impact Report: Farms for Climate, Education, Nutrition, & Skills [Annual Report]. School Farms. https://schoolfarms.org/impact-report-farms-for-climate-education-nutrition-s-kills-cens-july-2024-july-2025/

Sen, A. (2001). Development As Freedom. Oxford University Press USA - OSO.