NAIROBI, Kenya, April 16 – Food for Education (F4E), a locally led school feeding program, says that it has expanded its reach in the country.
F4E has unveiled a new green Giga Kitchen capable of producing 60,000 meals per day, growing monthly meals from 315,000 in January 2023 to 3.8 million in January 2024.
The company says it has served over 40 million meals to date and scaled 30 times since 2020, offering affordable school meals in Kenya.
The increase in numbers is attributed to Founder and CEO Wawira Njiru accepting the prestigious Skoll Award for Social Innovation on behalf of F4E at the Skoll Forum in Oxford, UK.
The award, along with the Elevate Prize and the Barry & Marie Lipman Family Prize, recognizes F4E’s leadership and innovation in driving transformational change and sustainable impact at scale.
“We are driven by an insatiable ambition to ensure no child has to learn on a hungry stomach and we thank our donors, partners, and parents for sharing in our vision. Collectively, these awards are a vote of confidence in our locally rooted, scalable, and replicable school-feeding blueprint and business model,” said Njiru.
“Working together, these investments will further propel us as we work to build more resilient, just, and sustainable food systems across the continent.”
Despite the potential of the $156 billion school feeding economy, millions of African children still face classroom hunger daily.
F4E aims to mainstream its model and ecosystem approach across the continent, prioritizing nutritional quality, local sourcing, innovation, operational excellence, and strategic partnerships.
“We continued to be inspired by Wawira and the F4E team’s remarkable ability to prioritize both immediate impact and long-term transformational change by focusing on scale, efficiency and excellence in delivery,” shared Kristin Groos Richmond, Food for Education Board Chair, Co-founder and former CEO at Revolution Foods, and Managing Director at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation.
“It is an incredibly demanding effort to maintain excellence with this pace of growth and impact but by running operations with the vision, focus and operational discipline of any global food company, Food 4 Education keeps pushing the bar of what’s possible.”
Starting from feeding 25 kids in 2012, F4E now collaborates with Nairobi, Murang’a, and Mombasa County governments and supports thousands of smallholder farmers, predominantly women.
The model has led to significant positive impacts on nutritional, educational, and economic outcomes, including meeting 100 percent of daily dietary diversity needs, increasing school enrollment by 30 percent, boosting school attendance by 20 percent, and creating 3,000 jobs.
