Her initiative feeds 3,000 school children every day

For four years between 2010 and 2014, Wawira Njiru lived in the Australian city of Adelaide.

Wawira, 28, was studying a degree in nutrition and food sciences at the University of South Australia.

With these skills, she hoped to change lives once she returned home.

Her studies made her understand the impact of nutrition, particularly on children’s growth. She also appreciated how lack of nutritious food keeps thousands of children out of school, and how those who manage to go to school struggle to concentrate in class.

“Millions of children in Kenya and hundreds of millions in Africa go to school on empty stomachs. My dream was to ensure that no child goes to school hungry. This would also give the children the opportunity to fulfil their academic potential,” Wawira explains.

LIVING HER DREAM

Today, she is living her dream through Food for Education (Food 4 Education), an initiative that feeds schoolchildren in Kiambu County. She started this project while still in Australia.

So, what did it take to get her idea off the ground? Wawira started by selling her idea to friends. Based on their reception, she would then assess its viability. It was a new territory for her to venture into, one she had no clue about.

That she was testing out her idea thousands of miles away from home made it look almost fanciful. She was, however, ready to take the big risk.

“I organised and held a community dinner in Adelaide and invited guests. I then cooked a Kenyan-inspired dinner for the 80 guests who showed up. At the end of the evening, we had raised Sh125,000, which to me was a terrific start,’’ she says,

Her idea had panned out. This money was used to construct a makeshift kitchen near one of the target schools in Ruiru.

The remainder was spent on an energy-saving cooker. Soon, the programme was up and running.

At the inception of Food 4 Education in 2011, the initiative provided subsidised lunch to 25 children from underprivileged backgrounds in Ruiru.

Through online campaigns to raise money to fund her project, Wawira was able to stay the course.

Fast forward to 2019 and the initiative now feeds more than 3,000 schoolchildren every day and employs 30 people including cooks and drivers.

This is also Wawira’s fulltime job. She serves as the executive director.

As she plans to widen the scope of her initiative, targeting 12 schools from the current six from June, Wawira is upbeat about the evolution of her initiative from a nebulous idea to a thriving enterprise in just under eight years.

The expansion is expected to increase to 10,000 the number of beneficiaries.

‘‘We recently launched a technology we call Tap2Eat where parents send Sh15 via MPESA, which is topped up to a virtual wallet linked to an NFC wrist band worn by children. Children Tap2Eat and receive their lunch in under five seconds,’’ she says.

This programme, she says also allows parents to be more involved in the dietary needs of their children by providing part of the lunch money while Food 4 Education caters for the balance.

IMPACT

Has the programme been impactful? In ways she had not thought about, she says.

‘‘To assess the progress of our project, we track attendance and performance in our beneficiary schools. From when we started, we have seen remarkable improvement in these parameters,’’ she notes.

As a trained nutritionist, Wawira is in charge of the process, and ensures that food served to the learners contains all the nutritional elements necessary for the children’s health and growth.

The effects of lack of school-feeding programmes, or the withdrawal of such programmes where they exist, are mostly felt by children who hail from poor families.

Statistically speaking, more than 10,000 children in Turkana dropped out of school in 2014 due to hunger.

According to data from the county, school enrolment in the county had tumbled from 130,000 learners to 118,000 learners in less than a year between 2013 and 2014 after the school feeding programme was withdrawn by donors.

It is this gap that Wawira ultimately hopes to seal. And if she had the power to change the school feeding landscape in Kenya, Wawira would have the government commit more money to the cause.

She says,

‘‘The country has 12.5 million public primary school children. If the Indian government is able to feed 120 million school children very day, why not us?’’

‘‘To achieve the aspiration of quality education for Kenyan children, the government ought to make school feeding a priority,’’ she adds, pointing out that this can be done through partnerships with parents and the government, which should provide meal subsidies to ensure that no child goes to school on an empty stomach.”

‘‘A hungry child can’t learn, so there is no point in sending them to school. By providing the right nutrition and education for our children who constitute 43 percent of our population, we will be investing in their future. It is only through this that they will also be able to contribute to the country in the days to come,’’ she notes.