School milk programs and child nutrition: leveraging local governments and markets

The literature extensively documents the nutritional impact of School Milk Programs (SMPs) on school-going children. Nonetheless, a gap exists regarding the identification of mechanisms influencing the placement and implementation of SMPs. This paper presents new insights regarding the mediated role of local governments, parent-teacher associations (PTAs), and dairy cooperatives in connection with SMP’s association with child nutrition. This study utilizes exogenous historical variations in the establishment of village-level dairy cooperative societies and randomly assigned political reservations for women in Indian local governments to examine the relationship between SMPs and nutritional outcomes for school-going children. The findings indicate a 14.6% drop in the probability of HAZ score falling below −2σ and a 14.3% reduction in the likelihood of being underweight among the school-going children. The mediated effects of women’s reservations in local governments and the presence of PTAs on the z-scores of height-for-age and weight-for-age are 0.27σ and 0.19σ, respectively.