From 25 to 100.000 school meals for Kenyan children
Kenyan nutritionist Wawira Njiru (32) is an entrepreneur and the founder and director of Food4Education. This social enterprise started by providing nutritious meals to 25 schoolchildren who sat in class with rumbling tummies. Nowadays the organisation supplies nutritious school meals to 100.000 Kenyan school children every day.
Wawira Njiru: ‘I started Food4Education ten years ago, while I was studying nutrition at a university in Australia. As a student, I became very aware of the impact of a healthy diet on the performance and development of children. Far too many children go to school hungry in Kenya. This has demonstrably negative consequences for their growth and ability to learn. I decided that after graduating, I wanted to do my part in finding a solution to this issue.’
School meals
‘I asked my parents and friends if they could identify the biggest problem in Kenyan public schools. Teachers said that many children had nothing to eat for lunch. That’s when I realised what I needed to do: provide school meals. I started to collect money while I was still studying. We started with 1.250,- dollars. We used it to set up a kitchen and hire a cook who prepared lunches for 25 schoolchildren. These consisted of corn or rice with beans and fresh vegetables, which is a standard meal in Kenya. It was a resounding success: the children performed better and there were fewer dropouts. It was great to see; it kept me going. Once again it made me think, I must find a way to do this for everyone.
I soon began to search for suitable board members for Food4Education. I had graduated in nutrition, but I didn’t know how to run an organisation. I was 21 years old, really young. But I listened to advice and was open to learning everything other people could teach me.’
Journey
‘The growth of Food4Education was a journey; I had to convince a lot of people of the importance of a healthy diet, and that it is a real problem that a lot of children go to school hungry. I have had many conversations, made media appearances, given interviews and posted on Facebook. I had to generate a lot of interest to convey my passion for school meals. The main message has always been that there is a solution to the issues of school dropouts, poor school results and hungry schoolchildren. Many people doubted whether anything could be done at all about such an intractable problem. But subsidised school meals pay for themselves many times over. The World Food Programme has calculated that for every euro invested in healthy food, the socio-economic return is more than 9 euros per child. So the chance that a child grows up healthy and develops into an economically independent adult is considerably increased by Food4Education.’
'Far too many children go to school hungry in Kenya.'
Self-sustaining
‘After the initial success, I wanted to expand, because the initiative would only become self-sustaining if we could feed a million children every day. Food4Education’s greatest priority was scaling up. I found a kitchen in India where they prepared thousands of meals. In 2006 we built a new centralised kitchen based on that model, in which 3000 meals a day could be prepared. Initially, meals were paid for with cash, but in 2019 we started to use Tap2Eat and thanks to this mobile digital payment platform, we were able to take a giant leap forward. We now have eight kitchens and a team of 600 people. We provide and distribute 100.000 meals a day. A school meal costs 15 cents. Parents pay half through the mobile Tap2Eat app, and the other half is subsidised with money from funds like the Sint Antonius Stichting. Parents who cannot afford the meals – about 10% – get them entirely paid for.’
The future
‘At the moment I am trying to get the Kenyan government to increase what it contributes to school meals, as a good investment in the next generation’s future. It has not been an easy path. It doesn’t help that I’m a young woman either. Policymakers don’t think: “Wow, what an inspiring young lady”, but rather: “What’s this naïve little girl doing here?” It’s thanks to my tenacity and focus that Food4Focus still hasn’t exhausted its limits. The problem may seem insurmountable – there are 10 million children in Kenya – but it can be solved and the results will exceed all the costs. If Kenyan children stay in school, perform better and don’t drop out because of hunger, that will be an amazing result which will pay off in the future. We have even noticed it at Food4Education: a number of children who we helped ten years ago with school meals have completed their education and are now working for us.’