From leadership research to district action: School nutrition programs in Dubai: a landscape analysis

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Background Little is known about the execution of School Nutrition Programs (SNPs) within schools across the public and private sectors in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. This highlights the importance of capturing an inside perspective about the specificities of the SNPs in order to ensure their effective, efficient, and equitable implementation across schools, irrespective of whether they are public or private. Objective The overall purpose of this study was to develop insight into SNPs in Dubai, and to investigate the difference in characteristics of those SNPs, between the public and private sectors. Methods This study relied on a quantitative tailor-made survey. The data were analyzed using SPSS; descriptive analysis consisted of computing the proportions for all the variables. In terms of inferential analysis, chi-square test of independence was selected to determine whether there are associations between the categorical variables (i.e., the various characteristics of the SNPs, and whether the corresponding schools are public or private). Results Out of 75 school representatives who were invited to participate in the current study, 60 responded, of whom 48 school representatives indicated that their respective schools had SNPs. These 48 SNPs had varying implementation scopes and program compositions (i.e., combination of initiatives) of Parents’ Involvement, Lunch Box, Educational Curriculum, Hydration, Awareness Activities, School Canteen, and/ or Food Safety and Hygiene. The stakeholders involved in developing and maintaining the respective SNPs and the intended outcomes of those programs also differed across the schools. Conclusion This study highlights, in alignment with Sustainable Development Goals 3, 4, 9 and 17, the importance of the proposed reformation around SNPs in Dubai to take into account the governance structure on the local and national levels, quality assurance measures, stakeholder engagement, and programs’ intended outcomes and compositions. It proposes the enactment and maintenance of holistic, school-level healthy living programs that include nutrition as part of a more comprehensive approach to fostering the students’ individual and collective wellbeing.

Study methods

This study took place in Dubai, UAE in the academic year 2018–2019. With more than 3 million citizens (a third of the country’s population), Dubai is the most populated Emirate of the UAE (31). Sustaining and promoting public health in the UAE is one of the top priorities of the country’s leaders, where they aim to have more active and healthy citizens supporting the development of the country. As a result, one of the main parts of the UAE national agenda is non-communicable diseases (NCDs) prevention. This goal has been put into focus earlier during the high general United Nations (UN) assembly in 2011 which cascaded down to World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines internationally, in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA), and into the Gulf countries (32–34). A systematic review identified 298 government-led, school-based nutrition programs in MENA referred to in the literature that is published between 2001 and 2021. The most common interventions were school meals and school feeding programs, followed by nutrition education within the curriculum, extracurricular nutrition education, standards for school canteens or foods/beverages available in schools, and training of school staff (32). Another systematic review that scanned the available scientific evidence pertaining to school-based nutrition interventions across MENA revealed that appropriately designed and implemented nutrition interventions has been positively impacting nutrition knowledge, and health and diet-related behaviors in children and adolescents in MENA (35). A lot of work has been done in the UAE regarding NCDs, the UAE’s vision 2021 aims to achieve a world-class healthcare system and entails a decrease in lifestyle diseases as part of the strategy for the nation.

Limitations

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A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Reem AlGurg; Nour Abu Mahfouz; Farah Otaki; Agnes Paulus; Amar Hassan Khamis; Mohamad Alameddine. School nutrition programs in Dubai: a landscape analysis. Frontiers in Public Health (2025-07-25). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2025.1584497

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.