Every March 1st, Africa marks Africa School Feeding Day. The day is set aside to emphasise the need for school feeding schemes as a way to increase enrollments and improve retention and performance. Millions of children in Africa do not attend school due to hunger.
A young Kenyan nutritionist Wawira Njiru started the ‘Food for Education’ feeding programme which provides highly subsidized and nutritious lunches to schools in Kenya.
Friday, half past noon, we are in Ruiru Primary school in Central Kenya, just in time for lunch – just in time to witness the mad dash to the kitchen for these pupils armed with containers that come in different sizes.
Ten years ago, things were different here and at several other schools where Food for Education – a local charity – serves lunch.
Thirty-one-year-old nutritionist Wawira Njiru is the brain behind the idea.
“So, food for education came as a response to make sure that kids have access to nutritious meals to enable them to learn,” says Njiru.
From a central kitchen that operates 24 hours, food is packed into specialised vehicles which snake their way through the villages and all the way to Nairobi and distribute the food across several schools to ensure that at exactly the same time, thousands of children will have a meal to eat.
From a hundred students 10 years ago, Food for Education has grown to serving 33,000 meals every day.
“It started off as a small passion project and it was that for about five years, and when I finished my undergraduate and I started thinking how we can grow it and so, we set up our first central kitchen to feed around 300 children and now feed around 33,000 children,” adds Njiru.
Statistics from the World Food Program indicates that just over 60 million children live in extreme poverty and they have no access to school feeding programmes, so this meal that Food for Education provides makes all the difference.
“Across the world, 388 million children get access to meals but only 53 million are in Africa. So, it means that less than 14% of all the kids who eat in the world are in Africa, yet we feed the least,” says Njiru.
Wawira says school enrollments and completion have increased at all schools Food for Education services.
“Food attracts children to school and it also keeps them in school. So, children are able to learn, they are able to listen to what the teacher is saying. You can imagine trying to listen to a teacher when you are hungry, you are not going to listen to them,” Njiru elaborates.
The Ruiru Primary School Principal Stephen Saruni attests to this.
“I can say that minus food (there is) no education. Children entirely depend on food to make them energetic to undertake these lessons. This program has really assisted us in terms of retaining children in school,” says Saruni.
Each meal costs 15 Kenyan Shillings which is about 0.13 US cents. To access the meal, the children’s parents fund an e-wallet. The amounts reflect in wrist bands and those who have paid up wear to the kitchen.
“So, we have a service called tap to eat. It’s a digital way that parents can register with us and enable their children to get food every single day,” says Njiru.
Food for Education has won Wawira recognition last year. She was named Kenya’s United Nations Person of the Year and in 2018 she was named the winner of the Global Citizen Prize.
Kenya’s school feeding program has scaled down to only provide food in arid and semi-arid areas, despite the need. Wawira is now working with a local senator to come up with a national school feeding policy for Kenya.
VIDEO: Africa School Feeding Day – School meals lauded as an investment in Africa’s future
