It takes a village…. To feed a child

Locally run school feeding programmes are a rarity in Africa despite decades of evidence that they’re an effective solution to child hunger.

Food4Education (F4E) is a Kenyan non-profit organisation committed to mainstreaming school feeding across the continent by creating an effective blueprint, running it and then helping to replicate it.

Since its inception in 2012, the organisation has grown from serving 1 million meals a year to over 1 million meals a week. Today, its 21 urban, central and 55 rural kitchens provide nutritious, affordable, locally sourced hot meals to over 340,000 school children every day across a network of 1,000+ schools. It’s an achievement combining vision with the operational efficiency of a global food corporation.

The scale of these operations is supported and amplified by government partnerships such as that with Nairobi County, which makes lunch affordable for a quarter of the children enrolled in the capital’s public schools, most of whom come from poor neighbourhoods.

To run smoothly, the programme relies on a team of more than 3,000 people, including cooks, loaders, cleaners, drivers and area leaders, who coordinate with the school administrators, caterers and Tap2Eat managers, who run the mobile money-based Tap2Eat system that allows parents to make micro-payments to cover the cost of meals. Working across multiple value chains, this crew is the beating heart of a locally driven network that includes thousands of smallholder farmers (75% women-led), a trusted pool of aggregators and a 2,800 square metre warehouse.

We met with some of these F4E professionals, and these are the insights they shared.

Carol Kinuthia manages the F4E Giga-Kitchen, a 3,000 square metre sustainable energy infrastructure that prepares and delivers 60,000 meals a day to Nairobi’s school children.

A young nutritionist, she began her career as a kitchen apprentice after graduating. Now 24, she oversees all kitchen operations from the receipt of raw materials to the delivery of meals to schools. She supervises 48 people who alternate night and day shifts to ensure the food is cooked, inspected, loaded and delivered to the schools at the right temperature and on time for lunch.

“I was running a 10,000-meal kitchen before I was appointed to the Giga-Kitchen. I quickly had to adapt to a much larger scale as well as to the steam system that this kitchen uses. The biggest challenge, though, has been working with the cooks and procurement department to find recipes that successfully combine high yields with excellent nutritional quality.”

The standard lunch consists of lentils stewed with onions, tomatoes, cabbages and carrots, served with rice. Alternatively, beans and the same vegetables enter the food basket, served with rice. Meals are delivered across Nairobi in large pots, which are clearly labelled so that the right pots are delivered to the intended schools. Once there, the pots are unloaded by the school lunch staff who make sure everything is ready for serving.

Ann Njoki works at Salama Primary School in Mathare, one of Nairobi’s most densely populated slums. From Monday to Friday, between 12:40 and 13:30, she prepares and coordinates the lunch service for the school’s 2,200 students who have registered for the school meal programme through the Tap2Eat virtual wallet.

“The service has to be really fast. The children line up according to their shift, their yellow smart wristband is scanned for payment, and we serve them from small containers they bring from home. Some of them don’t eat the whole lunch, but save some for dinner. If there is food left over, we call a second round”.

Beatrice N. Osaka is the Head Teacher of Salama Primary School.

She runs the school with a clear understanding of the biggest challenges facing the pupils as well as their families.

“Learning is not a priority when your stomach is empty,” she explained. “Many children in the area used to drop out of school because they were out looking for food. Now they know there will be food and they come to class regularly. Learning is not their primary motivation, it is a by-product, it is something that happens along the way. Nevertheless, it is important that they spend their days in a learning environment! We have to insist that they stay at home if they are ill, because they come anyway, knowing they are going to eat. And once they’re in class, they know they have to behave and listen to their teachers, otherwise they risk being dismissed and not having lunch. At the same time, lunch gives them the energy they need to learn properly, so everything is connected”.

Madame Osaka and her staff identify the most vulnerable of the 2,600 boys and girls enrolled in the school and offer them free lunches for the duration of the term.

Collaboration with school administrations is crucial for the success of the programme, as is parent buy-in. The competitive cost of each meal (5 shillings per student) and the payment flexibility offered by the Tap2Eat system are definitely the primary benefits for families. Some of the students we spoke to also discussed the difference the new school feeding programme is making to their parents.

Selina, 11, mentioned that she used to go back home to eat before the F4E programme was implemented in her school. She commented: “I enjoyed the break, but can see it’s much easier for my mother if I eat at school. And I can’t complain: the food is delicious!”.

Zamyr and Immanuel (both 12) recognised that the meals free their parents from a daily burden. “My mother used to prepare lunch for me and my sister, but she had to get up really early to do that, as we leave for school at 6:15 am,” Zamyr said.

“The previous meal service was costly, and the payment system wasn’t flexible. Each family had to pay for the whole term, including days when you were sick and couldn’t go to school,” Immanuel added.

By advocating for government school feeding subsidies, making parental contributions to meal costs easier, and leveraging economies of scale to lower the price of meals, Food4Education’s team, together with the communities it works with, is building one of Africa’s most affordable, sustainable, replicable and scalable school feeding models.