This archive report was first published on 27 October 2021.
On October 25, 2021, Wawira Njiru, the founder of Food 4 Education, received the 2021 UN Person of the Year Award at the UN's Kenya office in Nairobi.
She was accompanied by her parents and members of the team at Food 4 Education, which prides itself in providing nutritious lunches to vulnerable school children every school day to end classroom hunger and improve school attendance and performance.
“With this award, we hope our work will continue to show the importance of school feeding program as well as highlight how every child needs a meal to learn,” Wawira stated.
Her organization has grown steadily from humble beginnings and currently provides lunches for over 33,000 children every day. Food 4 Education hopes to be able to provide meals for over 1,000,000 children daily in the next five years.
Wawira founded the organization in 2012, after realizing that an empty stomach was one of the biggest barriers standing in the way of an education for many Kenyan children.
She started the operation with Ksh126,000 raised from a Kenyan themed meal party she hosted while an undergraduate at the University of South Australia in Adelaide.
From a makeshift kitchen feeding 25 children in Ruiru, Food 4 Education currently feeds children as far as Mombasa, partnering with local smallholder farmers who supply them with produce.
They make the food in their own kitchens and deliver it to schools, and have also been hailed for integrating technology with Tap 2 Eat – a digital platform that allows children in public schools access to meals.
