Nutrition as a Foundation for Learning: Collaborating with ISCO

We don’t always think of nutrition as directly tied to learning, but the food students consume daily plays a crucial role in shaping their health and development. For children in urban areas affected by poverty, where fresh ingredients can be scarce and the economic situation is harsh, even small nutritional deficiencies can have lasting effects on their physical and cognitive growth.

During a visit in June to ISCO’s six learning centers (LCs) in several districts of Jakarta—Kalibaru, Penjaringan, Kampung Mangga, Semper, Mangga Dua, and Pademangan— COR saw an opportunity to collaborate on this nutrition program under the Asia Lunchbox Fund. This led to the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in August 2024, formalizing our partnership to provide nutritious meals four days a week at these centers to start in August.

To better understand the local dietary conditions and challenges, COR interviewed project officers, teachers, and parents from the six learning centers during a field visit in June 2024. Through these conversations, we learned that most public schools in Indonesia do not provide lunches. In impoverished areas, parents are often unable to afford or prepare lunch for their children due to financial pressure or work obligations. As a result, some children must wait until after school to have their first meal of the day.

A wide variety of lunches are brought by students at an LC in Pademangan. Photo: Serena

Local dietary habits further complicate the situation. Children tend to prefer fried foods and sugary iced drinks, such as the powdered beverages or sweet teas sold at local street corners. There low cost makes them easily accessible to children, who often have consume them nearly every day. Additionally, vegetables are rarely eaten, and fruits, being more expensive, seldom make it into their diets. Over time, this imbalanced nutrition negatively affects their health and leads to frequent illness. As children fall sick more often, absenteeism increases, directly affecting their attendance rates and academic performance and indirectly limiting their future educational and career opportunities.

The six learning centers COR visited are located in Jakarta’s run-down neighborhoods. Each varies in size, which directly impacts their ability to provide meals. Most centers lack proper kitchen facilities, with some relying on local mothers to prepare meals in their home kitchens and deliver them to the centers. Others have small spaces where they can set up a gas stove to cook meals. However, without proper ventilation, cooking becomes uncomfortably hot. At a learning center near the railway tracks in Mangga Dua, where space is extremely limited due to its location in an unregulated gray zone, they rely on project officers to purchase food and snacks for the students from nearby vendors. There’s no space for cooking meals as the learning center is only a couple of square meters with a small restroom and just enough space to accommodate 10 people, including the teacher.

We spoke with Adin, a mother of four whose 8-year-old child attends ISCO’s learning center in Mangga Dua. Adin’s family lives in a small one-room apartment where they all share a large bed, and a few shelves in the corner hold their belongings. For cooking, she has to step out into the corridor and borrow a small gas stove and rice cooker from her neighbors. Adin explained that while ready-made food is more expensive and less healthy, it’s more convenient than cooking at home.

As we’ve identified, there are many unique challenges each center faces in maintaining a stable meal program. Some centers need to find cooks with the knowledge, availability and proximity to the learning center to help with cooking, while others require upgrades to their facilities. Centers without enough space to cook need to collaborate with nearby learning centers where meals can be prepared and also consider how they can be delivered. Currently, ISCO’s budget constraints prevent them from providing daily meals. On days when full meals cannot be given, they offer fruit, milk, or biscuits as healthy snacks.

As Julinda Dewi Simbolon Executive Director of ISCO told us “Through partnering with Calls Over Ridges, we aim to increase the frequency of nutritious lunches provided each week, improve the quality of the meals, and implement a more systematic meal delivery process with data-driven tracking and analysis methods to measure the program’s effectiveness.” Workshops are also planned to teach parents how to prepare simple and nutritious meals in order to start better eating habits from the home.

By working together with ISCO, Calls Over Ridges hopes to amplify the impact of the Asia Lunchbox Fund and uplift the health and academic potential of the children we serve for a better future for themselves and their communities.