About 90 percent of children in Africa don’t get enough to eat – and children suffering from malnutrition are far less likely to keep going to school. Without an education, millions of children are held in a cycle of poverty. Despite decades of evidence that school feeding programs are an effective solution to childhood hunger, locally led school feeding programs are a rarity in Africa.
Food for Education (F4E) designs and operates a scalable system to feed children at schools and invest in local farmers and parents in the process. Developed in Kenya, the F4E model uses centralized kitchens, technology, and smart supply chains to deliver hot, nutritious, and affordable meals to nearly 300,000 school children daily.
F4E’s goal is to chart a path toward continent-wide school feeding access, leveraging government partnerships to scale and subsidize delivery of school meals to Africa’s more than 400 million children.
Many children in Africa do not have access to healthy, protein-rich meals at school
Food for Education delivers subsidized meals to students using cutting-edge technology.
Wawira Njiru blended her experience as a nutritionist and social entrepreneur to focus on Africa's nutrition crisis.
The organization aims to solve the child nutrition crisis for over 200 million African children.
Food for Education envisions a world where no child has to learn on an empty stomach. They have created a blueprint for school feeding programs that can be spread across Africa, improving nutritional and educational outcomes, enhancing economic prosperity, and creating jobs.
By advocating for government subsidies for school feeding, making parental contribution to meal costs easier, and leveraging economies of scale to lower the price of meals, Food for Education is building Africa’s most affordable, sustainable, replicable, and scalable school feeding model. The 2023 opening of F4E’s giga kitchen, the largest kitchen in Africa, played a monumental role in proving the scalability and sustainability of this vision. In Kenya alone, Food for Education will scale its operation to feed nutritious and affordable meals to 1 million children every day.
Founder and Executive Director, Food for Education
Wawira Njiru is a trained nutritionist, seasoned social entrepreneur, and the Founder and Executive Director of Food for Education (F4E). Wawira is a talented leader who is passionate about solving problems in her community while building local economies and creating jobs. She leads F4E’s overall strategy of co-designing locally led partnerships with smallholder farmers, parents, logistics suppliers, and government to deliver efficient, nutritious, and affordable school feeding programs at scale. Wawira has received numerous prestigious awards for her work. She was the first recipient of the 2018 Global Citizen Youth Leadership Prize presented by Cisco, the 2021 United Nations Person of the Year and the recipient of the World's 50 Best 2022 Icon Award. She is a 2021 Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum, a 2020 Ford Foundation Global Fellow, and a 2018 Rainer Arnhold Fellow.
